Our prisons are infested with powerful, nationwide gangs, e.g. Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia, that make millions (maybe billions) of dollars in drug trafficking. Many of their leaders direct operations from their jail cells.
Now if one of these gangs has a beef with the Colorado DOC, what better way to strike and send a message "don't [...] with us" than by taking down the top man. I'm putting my money on this theory. That this murder was more to send a message to the CO D.O.C. than a personal beef with this Director, who by reports seemed to have been an OK guy.
I tip my hat to you, Stephen Hawking. It does seem that opposition to the apartheid in Palestine is gaining much-belated traction, no small thanks to Obama's refusal to be Israel's stooge the last 4 1/2 years, unlike all previous presidents. It's not that Obama doesn't want peace for that area, he is just clever enough to know that the Israelis have been playing the USA, as Jimmy Carter articulated extremely clearly in his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Such changes in the climate make it easier for guys like Hawking to make such a statement without suffering the predictable retaliation of being branded an anti-semite. No wonder we are being inundated with a surge of Holocaust-related stories in the news media these days. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!