May I raise my squeamish, liberal minority opinion here?
More than social status, I think it is also an age thing. It's a fact of life that there are not too many 70 year old inmates with a still violent nature in their daily prison routine, while testosterone-charged thirty-year olds go mad and aggressive with it. Unless you believe that all prisons should be darwinistic survival dens where the strongest live better than the weakest, the two age groups should be sensibly kept apart in different tracts.
Phil Spector might deserve to die in prison, but he doesn't deserve to be bullied until he does. That's not a viable concept in any penal system. The state has sentenced him to prison, not to being bullied. If he spends the rest of his life tending the audio part of the prison library thinking why it was wrong to shoot Ms Clarkson then hopefully that is ample retribution for her; him being threatend by other inmates won't make her come alive either.