British Journal of Criminology Advance Access originally published online on June 9, 2009
British Journal of Criminology 2009 49(5):667-685; doi:10.1093/bjc/azp035
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The British Journal of Criminology 49:667-685 (2009)
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Prison Islam in the Age of Sacred Terror
* Criminology Department, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809, United States; Mhamm{at}indstate.edu
Research indicates that Islam is the fastest growing religion among prisoners in Western nations. In the United States, roughly 240,000 inmates have converted to the faith since the 9/11 attacks. According to federal law enforcement, Saudi-backed Wahhabi clerics have targeted these prisoners for terrorist recruitment. The present research examines this claim from several different perspectives. First, it reviews the literature on prisoner conversions to Islam and concludes that there are opposing viewpoints on the matter. One side of the debate takes an alarmist stance, arguing that prisons have become incubators for Islamic terrorism; the other side asserts that Islam plays a vital role in prisoner rehabilitation. Second, results of a two-year study of prisoner radicalization and terrorist recruitment in US prisons are reported. The motives for prisoner conversions to Islam are discussed along with the effects of conversion on inmate behaviour; the role played by gangs and charismatic leaders in radicalizing prisoners; and the social processes by which inmates move from radicalization to operational terrorism. Third, two case studies are presented. One involves a terrorist plot waged by a gang of Sunni prisoners at California's New Folsom Prison; the other looks at the inmate-led Islamic Studies Program at Old Folsom Prison, which has adopted a de-radicalization agenda. It is argued that inmate self-help programmes may do more than the state to prevent radicalization and terrorist recruitment behind bars.
Key Words: prisoner radicalization • prisoner de-radicalization • terrorism • Islam in prison • terrorist subcultures • Muqqaddimah
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Introduction |
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Today, there are more than 2.3 million people serving time in American correctional facilities. An estimated one-third of them claim some form of religious affiliation (Dammer 2002; Drum 2007). Research suggests that many of these prisoners began their incarceration with little or no religious calling, but adopted a faith during their imprisonment (Clear and Sumter 2002; Thomas and Zaitzow 2004).
More and more, American prisoners are being drawn to religions outside the Judeo-Christian mainstream. There are many non-Judeo-Christian religions found in US prisons. They include: Buddhism; Hinduism; Sikh Dharma; Islam (al-Islam, Sunni, Shiite and Sufi strains of the religion, as well as American versions including Moorish Science Temple, Nation of Islam, Five Percent Nation); Native American; Rastafarian; Hispanic religions (Santeria, Curanderism, Espiritismo); black separatist religions (Nation of Yahweh, Black Hebrew Israelism); and white supremacy religions: Christian Identity, Teutonic Wicca, Odinism and its Icelandic counterpart, Asatru. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, some of these inmates may be vulnerable to terrorist recruitment.
A growing body of evidence suggests that this warning should not be taken lightly. The 2008 National Intelligence Estimate indicates that while al-Qaeda is and will remain the most serious threat to US security, the nation also faces a threat from decentralized ‘self-starter’ jihad groups and individuals who already live in the United States (NIC 2008). Studies show that self-starter jihad groups are typically organized around friendship and kinship arrangements (Benjamin and Simon 2006; Hamm 2007a; Richardson 2006). Sageman's (2004; 2008) authoritative work reveals that while self-starter groups may be motivated by al-Qaeda propaganda, their terrorism would not be possible without the social interactions that occur in small cells where members are pressured to meet one another's expectations. Central to this dynamic is the fact that jihad cells typically form from pre-existing social groups—or what Sageman calls ‘just a bunch of guys’.
The terrorist attacks in Casablanca (2003), Madrid (2004) and London (2005) were ‘all the work mostly of disgruntled citizens of each of these countries, swearing allegiance to the broad goals of the global jihad, but with little operational connection to foreign jihadi movements’ (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) 2007: 48). Yet, these cases are tied together by another thread: members of self-starter groups are less likely to be inspired by a militant imam at a mosque than they are to become radicalized through secret meetings held in bookstores, barbershops, public parks, internet cafés, virtual chat rooms and prisons.
Youseff Fikri, mastermind of the Casablanca suicide bombings, was a former prisoner in Morocco who, upon release, came under the influence of the Qaeda-affiliated Moroccan Combat Group and began a series of ‘Islamic’ executions, leading to the Casablanca attacks (Pargeter 2005). Jamal Ahmidan (1969–2004) and Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras were both indoctrinated into radical Islam in a Spanish prison and joined an al-Qaeda-linked Moroccan group before taking lead roles in the deadly train bombings in Madrid (Carlile 2006; Rotella 2004). Muktar Ibrahim, leader of the 21 July cell that attempted to bomb the London Underground in a follow-on to the 7/7 attacks, found religious calling in Islam at a British young offender's institution (Fox 2005). Richard Reid, the Qaeda ‘shoe bomber’ who attempted to blow up an American Airlines flight between Paris and Miami in 2001, converted to Islam at the same institution (BBC News 2001).
Perhaps no case demonstrates the dangers of prisoner radicalization like the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (1966–2006), the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi did not convert to Islam in prison (he had been raised in a Sunni family in Jordan), but, according to the terrorist's biographer, ‘it was in prison that his magnetism and strength appeared in a new light’ (Brisard 2005: 43). Prior to his incarceration at Jordan's high-security Suwaqah prison on terrorism-related charges in 1996, Zarqawi's ‘reputation was that of a hoodlum with vague religious learning’ (Brisard 2005: 40). Zarqawi thrived under the harsh conditions of the desert prison where he memorized large portions of the Koran, developed the body of a fighter and the proselytizing techniques of a zealot. These organizational skills allowed Zarqawi to recruit a gang of ordinary criminals and drug addicts that would later prove vital to his terrorist campaign in Iraq. As stated in the National Intelligence Estimate, the United States is not immune to this threat.
In 2005, the FBI interrupted a major terrorist plot to launch attacks on military sites, synagogues and other targets in Los Angeles. The plot was conceived by a gang of Sunni Muslims at California's New Folsom Prison, known as Jam'iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheed (the Assembly of Authentic Islam, or JIS). Prisoners—especially those in gangs—have long recruited inmates to act as their collaborators upon release. JIS, however, was the first prison gang in the United States to radicalize inmates into a gang alliance with a terrorist agenda.
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Clashing Viewpoints: The Research on Islam in Prison |
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The literature on Islam in prison is divided into two camps that could not be farther apart. One side takes an alarmist stance: US prisons are incubators for radical Islam and terrorist ideology. Yet, the alarmist position is based on research that lacks any real depth of understanding about the nature of prisoner subcultures, the social processes of religious conversion and the vulnerability of individuals to recruitment by terrorist organizations. These studies are also devoid of social science methodologies; there are no interviews with prisoners and they offer only scant evidence on the perceptions of wardens, guards, chaplains and gang intelligence officers. The other side of the debate is more reassuring. It is also based on ostensibly verifiable data. The criminological evidence indicates that there is no relationship between prisoner conversions to Islam and terrorism. If anything, just the opposite is true. Research shows that Islam has a moderating effect on prisoners that plays an important role in prison security and rehabilitation. Once on the path to restructuring their lives—down to the way they eat, dress, form support systems and divide their day into study, prayer and reflection—Muslim prisoners have begun the reformation process, making them less of a recruiting target for terrorists than other prisoners, and certainly less of a target than alienated street corner youths of the urban ghetto. In his review of the literature, religious historian Philip Jenkins (2003: 5) concludes that ‘Islam is a major presence in American prisons, and many would say that this is a good thing because the Muslim influence can encourage people to get their lives together, to get off drink or drugs, to learn self discipline’.
The studies
The first study of Islam in prison was Butler's (1978) review of reform policies resulting from judicial cases involving the Nation of Islam (NOI) during the 1960s. Butler studied reforms at prisons in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and found that the NOI contributed positively to inmate morale, discipline and rehabilitation. Butler did not examine conversions to Islam. Yet, interviews with chaplains and wardens at Louisiana's Angola Prison led the award-winning prisoner/author Wilbert Rideau to conclude that conversions to the NOI could be chalked up to ‘insincere inmates who are hunting ways to secure their needs or to obtain help in regaining their freedom’ (Rideau and Snider 1981: 31). In a study of prisoners who adopted the Muslim faith while incarcerated in an Illinois prison, however, Barringer (1998) found that conversions to Islam created the conditions necessary for increased prison adjustment, reduced stress, increased feelings of self-esteem and the sense that one has control over one's life and ability to change the self and the environment. There would not be another study of Islam in prison until after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. By that time, Islam was already the fastest growing religion among prisoners in Europe, the United States and Canada (Beckford et al. 2005; Guessous et al. 2001; Spalek and Wilson 2002; Zoll 2005). France is especially instructive, where roughly 8 per cent of the overall population is Muslim, yet Muslims make up an astounding 80 per cent of some prison populations (Khosrokhavar 2004). According to the exhaustive fieldwork of Beckford and associates (2005: 13), this trend is attributable to ‘Islamic radicals [who] have helped bring about the "revival of Islam" in prisons’.
Experts estimate that among those who seek faith while imprisoned in the United States, an equally astounding 80 per cent turn to Islam (Ammar et al. 2004; Waller 2003). The yearly number of conversions to Islam in municipal, state and federal correctional institutions is estimated at 30,000 (Dix-Richardson 2002) or perhaps as many as 40,000 (Waller 2003). Based on these estimates, some 240,000 American prisoners have converted to Islam since the 9/11 attacks. Among the post-9/11 studies are Dix-Richardson and Close's (2002) review of the reform possibilities of Islam. Here, prisoner conversions to Islam are attributed to broad social forces including court intervention, the impact of race in America, the role of religion in the African-American community and the volatility of prisoner subcultures. In a study of chaplains in the Ohio Department of Corrections, Ammar and colleagues (2004) found that most Muslim inmates convert to Islam while incarcerated, and that there is no relationship between conversion and subsequent criminal behaviour. In a study of chaplains in the Florida Department of Corrections, Dix-Richardson (2002) found that Islamic conversion among African-American female prisoners is uncommon due to their lack of familiarity with Islam, coupled with the fact that proselytizing is prohibited in Florida prisons. Spalek and El-Hassan (2007) recently interviewed a small sample of inmates who converted to Islam in British prisons and concluded that Islam provides converts with a moral framework from which to rebuild their lives.
Standing in stark contrast to these findings is an influential (undated) report by the Homeland Security Policy Institute and Critical Incident Analysis Prisoner Radicalization Task Force, entitled Out of the Shadows: Getting Ahead of Prisoner Radicalization (hereafter referred to as the Homeland Report). Based on the testimony of a select panel of law enforcement experts, the researchers concede that ‘there is insufficient information about prisoner radicalization to qualify the threat’ of Islam in prison. Nevertheless, the Homeland Report concludes that because Islam often feeds on resentment and anger within prisons, it is a religion that ‘poses a threat of unknown magnitude to the national security of the U.S.’ (Homeland Report: i, iv). In a report on the British penal system, the RAND corporation argues that ‘contemporary violent Jihadists can and will seek out new recruits in the prison environment’ (RAND 2008: 49). Likewise, Cuthbertson concludes that European prisons are an ideal setting for recruitment into Islamic terrorist organizations. Just as prisons are ‘schools for crime’, in which petty criminals ‘graduate’ into more serious criminal careers, so too are prisons ‘universities’ for advanced training in terrorism (Cuthbertson 2004: 15). Moreover, 9/11 has brought new scrutiny to Muslim prisoners in America and beyond. Zoll's (2005) nationwide investigation affirms that there are opposing views on the matter. The reassuring viewpoint takes the position that Islam offers prisoners a viable path to rehabilitation.1 The majority of those interviewed by Zoll, including administrators, insist there is no evidence of terrorist recruitment by Muslims in their prisons. This is confirmed by Thompson (2005) and Useem (2007), who found that prison officials in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio—states with large Muslim inmate populations—have seen no signs of terrorist recruiting. Rupp (2006) also concludes that Islamic terrorists have not infiltrated US prisons for the purpose of recruiting inmates. According to these studies, the typical convert to Islam is a poor, black American, upset about racism, not Middle East politics—someone who became a Muslim to cope with imprisonment, not to fulfil a religious obligation to Osama bin Laden. Although some prisoners become Muslim in name only, others undergo authentic conversions that help them interact with other inmates in a positive manner. Islam, therefore, provides a self-imposed discipline on inmates that gives prison authorities a convenient force to help them maintain order. Islam in prison is not without its problems, so goes the argument, but they pale in comparison to the dangers posed by such gangs as the Mexican Mafia, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the Aryan Brotherhood.
The alarmists make an opposing argument, claiming that Islamic prisoners represent a clear and present danger to the United States. Central to this concern is the fact that an al-Qaeda training manual, seized during a 2000 raid on an al-Qaeda safe house in Manchester, England, identifies Western prisoners as candidates for conversion to Islam because they may harbour hostility towards their governments (Pistole 2003; see also Gunaratna 2002). According to numerous sources, this problem can be traced to the government of Saudi Arabia, which is spending billions of dollars promoting Wahhabi Islam (a narrow, strict, puritanical form of Sunni Islam upon which the ideology of al-Qaeda is based). One researcher argues that the Saudis have supplied ‘money that has been spent on funding leading terrorist ... organizations that disseminate hatred in "education centers," charities, mosques, and even prisons—including many here in the United States’ (Baran 2005: 4). Another expert contends that nearly 10,000 copies of the Wahhabi Koran have been distributed to American prisoners (Gartenstein-Ross 2005). The Washington-based Center for Security Policy charges the Saudi Government with ‘efforts to recruit convicted felons in the U.S. prison system as cannon-fodder for the Wahhabist jihad’ (in Gaffney 2005: 1). The ultimate goal here is reportedly the conversion of large numbers of African-American prisoners to Wahhabism and its radical agenda. When released, these offenders will support terrorist goals, ‘murdering their own countrymen in a kind of "payback" for perceived injustices done to them by "white America"’ (Silverberg 2006: 1).
Enter Prison Islam
Even though the alarmist position is based largely on anecdotal evidence, it would be precipitous to close the book on a connection between inmate Islam and terrorism. This point is made abundantly clear in Knox's (2002) study of a Michigan prison gang called the Melanic Islamic Palace of the Rising Sun. After interviewing Melanics, other prisoners and guards, Knox found that the Melanics used their own brand of Islam to wage a ‘holy war’ against other prisoners, culminating in a 1999 riot at the Chippewa Correctional Facility—two years before the 9/11 attacks. The Melanics killed one guard and one prisoner in the uprising, injuring dozens of inmates. More than anything, the Melanics represent a mutating form of ‘Prison Islam’—small inmate cliques known for using gang methods of coercion and ‘cut-and-paste’ versions of the Koran to recruit new members—similar to JIS and other recent cases, both foreign and domestic in nature.
In 2006, a gang known as the Muslim Boys began showing up among inmates at Britain's high-security Belmarsh prison, where they became known as a criminal vanguard of religious extremists with ties to potentially more dangerous networks, including al-Qaeda. In his analysis of the Muslim Boys, Allen observes that ‘never before have black gangs in the UK been directly associated with or perceived to be involved in terrorism’ (Allen 2006: 40). Allen's conclusions are based in part on a Home Office report, which states that ‘Violent Islamic extremists are terrorizing inmates ... as they trawl for al-Qaeda recruits. They [Muslim Boys] force prisoners to accept the Muslim faith—those who refuse suffer assaults’ (Allen 2006: 40). The gang's victims were reportedly slashed by razor blades and scalded with hot water (Box 2006). By 2008, concerns had spread to the high-security Whitemoor prison, prompting Britain's Chief Inspector of Prisons to report ‘a rising problem of prisoner radicalization and an increase in Muslim conversions’. The report further states that some Muslim prisoners ‘operated as a gang and put pressure on non-Muslims to convert [and] conform to a strict and extreme interpretation of Islamic practice’ (HM's Chief Inspector of Prisons 2008: 43).
Contrary to both the alarmist position that ‘radicalized inmates, wishing to avoid attention, act as model prisoners’ (Homeland Report: 9), and the reassuring position that Islam in prison ‘is a good thing because [it] can encourage people to get their lives together’ (Jenkins 2003: 5), these cases show that some Islamic prisoners are using gang techniques to exert their religious beliefs for terrorist purposes.
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The Prisoner Radicalization Study |
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These concerns prompted my two-year study of trends in prisoner radicalization and terrorist recruitment in US correctional institutions (Hamm 2007b). The research used the FBI's definition of prisoner radicalization, defined as ‘the process by which inmates ... adopt extreme views, including beliefs that violent measures need to be taken for political or religious purposes’ (US Department of Justice 2004: 85). The study was based on the assumption that prison conversions to non-Judeo-Christian religions, particularly militant forms of Islam, may serve as the basis for radicalization—an assumption anchored in both US counterterrorism policy and established research on terrorism.
In 2006, shortly after the JIS conspiracy was run aground, then-US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stated that ‘The threat of homegrown terrorist cells—radicalized online, in prisons and in other groups of socially isolated souls—may be as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda, if not more so’ (Gonzales 2006). FBI Director Robert Mueller further warned that ‘Prisons are ... fertile ground for extremists. Inmates may be drawn to an extreme form of Islam because it may help justify their violent tendencies’ (Mueller 2006). In 2007, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ensconced this threat into public policy by creating a unit to combat the danger posed by home-grown terrorists. The DHS unit focuses primarily on the threat from Muslim extremists, including a number of Islamic prisoners (Hall 2007). The US Congress subsequently passed the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, calling for the establishment of a national commission to study and to make recommendations concerning the mitigation of ‘violent radicalization’ and ‘ideologically based violence in prison’. Recruitment methods used by Islamic terrorists are not designed to yield a large number of recruits (Sageman 2004). The few who do join terrorist networks are likely to be impressionable men in their twenties motivated by a newfound religious vision (Juergensmeyer 2000; Stern 2003), which may feed the militancy and anger generated by political conflicts, like the war in Iraq or the Arab–Israeli struggle (Richardson 2006; Scheuer 2006).
The prisoner radicalization study focused on inmate conversions to Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam (both traditional and American versions), Native American, Black Hebrew Israelism, Wicca and Odinism/Asatru. Approximately 140 hours of interviews were conducted with 15 prison chaplains from six states; seven gang intelligence officials from three states; three analysts from the FBI's National Joint Terrorism Task Force; and 30 prisoners incarcerated for violent crimes at the Franklin Correctional Institution in Carrabelle, Florida; California's Folsom Prison and the adjacent New Folsom Prison—including several members of JIS. Two-thirds of the 30 inmates in the study belonged to gangs and most of them had been in street gangs before incarceration. The research both confirms and refutes various alarmist and reassuring claims and makes some additional discoveries as well. Key findings are as follows.
Why prisoners convert
Although some religious conversions are motivated by personal crisis and others by the need for protection, the primary motivation for conversion is spiritual searching—seeking religious meaning to interpret and resolve discontent. Prisoners typically convert to Islam and other faiths upon the advice of parents, cellmates and fellow gang members. This confirms previous research showing that friendship and kinship networks are crucial in explaining how people are recruited into new religious movements (Lofland and Stark 1965). Searchers are also inspired by sacred texts and information found in literature, political hip-hop music, documentary films and media. Although some inmates may be encouraged by foreign terrorist groups like al-Qaeda (as was JIS), these groups are not directly involved in the conversion process.
Religious conversion and inmate behaviour
For the majority of inmates who convert to non-Judeo-Christian faiths, the experience increases self-discipline and helps them to interact in a positive manner with other inmates and staff, thereby making a meaningful contribution to their rehabilitation. However, from the crucible of good behaviour comes the potential for radicalization. This is what happens in overcrowded maximum-security institutions like New Folsom Prison, where there are few rehabilitation programmes; a shortage of chaplains to provide religious guidance to searchers; serious gang problems; and more politically charged living areas than in lesser-custody institutions. ‘There is an element of evil in this prison,’ said the chaplain at New Folsom. ‘Inmates will use any opportunity to lash out against society. There's no state-sponsored effort to save them. Most inmates sit around making knives at night .... This makes the prison a Petri dish waiting for terrorism to happen. The same mentality that drives prisoners drives the suicide bombers in Iraq.’ These are the social conditions that give rise to prisoner radicalization. Yet, radicalization is not the inevitable outcome of such structural forces. Nor is it solely the result of militant beliefs held by prisoners. Rather, radicalization is best understood by focusing on how inmates come together, create collective identities and decide to carry out directives from their leaders.
Prison Islam, radicalization and gangs
The study found a fairly consistent pattern of radicalization among young Islamic prisoners in maximum-security custody. By questioning inmates on their religious conversions, the interviews created the opportunity for prisoners to conflate the personal with the political, producing a wealth of information on ideology. Because the opportunity to participate in the research was announced weeks in advance of the field visits, prisoners often came to the interviews eager to express their views, sometimes with prepared notes. Some inmates spoke candidly of their outrage against the US Government for killing innocent civilians in Iraq, and mistreating Muslims at Guantanamo Bay. Some praised Osama bin Laden; some said they wanted to ‘do jihad’ against the government; others glorified suicide bombers. ‘People should be worried about us,’ declared a JIS member. ‘When our back is against the wall, we will seek justice.’ Intelligence officers agree that inmates are radicalized in this way by other radical inmates, and not by outside influences. Consistent with the JIS case, today, the greatest threat emanates from fringe elements of Prison Islam. Gang dynamics have become very complex in recent years, as members are now crossing racial lines to increase their numbers for protection. Former rivals, like the Crips and Bloods, are joining forces under Islamic banners. Neo-Nazis are becoming Sunni Muslims. Meanwhile, there is growing conflict within inmate Islam as various factions of the faith compete for followers, thereby pitting the NOI against Sunnis, Sunnis against Shiites, and Prison Islam against them all. ‘People are recruiting on the yard everyday,’ said a Folsom inmate. ‘It's a ripe climate for terrorism. It's scandalous. Everybody's glorifying Osama bin Laden. But these Muslims come to Islam with the same gang mentality they had on the streets. Same red rags, same blue rags [symbols of the Crips and Bloods].’
On an organizational level, then, radicalization is developed on a prison gang model. On an individual level, radicalization occurs through a process of one-on-one proselytizing by charismatic leaders who target the most vulnerable—those inmates who have spent, or will spend, much of their lives in prison and are no longer in contact with their families.
The radicalization/terrorism process
Although only a very small percentage of converts turn radical beliefs into terrorist action, the JIS case is not an isolated event. Since the arrest of JIS members in 2005, gang intelligence officers in Florida and California have uncovered potential Islamic terrorist plots inside their maximum security institutions. Included in the evidence for one case were plans, plot drawings, timelines, digital photographs and financial resources needed to carry out a terrorist attack on American soil. Importantly, the plot involved a parolee living in a community half-way house. Agents have also disrupted plots waged by white supremacy gangs who claim religious affiliation with Odinism, including attempts to use improvised explosive devices.
The process by which a group of prisoners move from radicalization to activism to operational terrorism may be modelled by the JIS case, as seen in Figure 1. As the figure illustrates, JIS began with a traditional form of American Islam (NOI), which was used as a foundation for creating an alternative religious vision expressed in a form of Sunni-inspired Prison Islam. This vision provided JIS members with identity, meaning and a collective grievance against the social forces responsible for their incarceration. JIS operated below security radar, under the guise of constitutionally protected rights to religious worship. Perhaps most importantly, though, JIS was distinguished by the piousness of its leader—a 26-year-old black Muslim from South Central Los Angeles, named Kevin James—who claimed special expertise as a representative and legitimate voice for Islam.
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Kevin James's piousness was central to his charismatic appeal. ‘The only thing I can say about Kevin James,’ said a New Folsom employee ‘is that he's all man. Guys in prison are under a lot of pressure and he never appeared to buckle’ (in Harris 2006). Known to other inmates as ‘Ash Shakyh Sudani’, James claimed to have spent time with Islamic extremists in Sudan—an apocryphal story that became a crucial part of his mythmaking. James is remembered as a slight, softly spoken man with large cornrows running down from his forehead, an untrimmed goatee and tattoos of crescents and ‘Allah’ (in Arabic) covering ‘7’ and ‘6’ tattoos on his forearms (for 76th Street Crips). Yet, what was most striking about James's appearance was a prominent ‘raisin’ in the middle of his forehead—the mark of a pious Muslim who grinds his head into the floor during prayer. James encapsulated JIS's collective grievance in prison gang culture, thereby fusing JIS's spiritual identity onto its gang history, which was already predisposed towards violence. Once JIS conceived its terrorist plot, it was taken to the community by a newly converted parolee who turned to a street gang for firearms to be used in a series of precursor crimes intended to fund the attack. Operatives were recruited from the international jihad movement inspired by the war in Iraq. JIS's outrage over the war resonated with each member's personal experiences, creating what Sageman (2008: 83) calls an interpretive bridge, wherein ‘the moral outrages from the global and the local reinforce each other and are viewed as part of the same whole, namely a war against Islam, and make young Muslims feel personally involved’. This moral outrage was then amplified within the group until it reached a level at which it was capable of being channelled into an act of Islamic terrorism.
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A Counterweight to Terrorist Recruitment in Prison |
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In history, design and aesthetic, Folsom Prison is quintessentially American. Built with granite rock by inmate labour in the late 1870s, Folsom State Prison sits above the mighty American River, some 30 miles east of Sacramento in a town appropriately named Repressa, California. The bleached fortress has a way of intimidating all comers. ‘Its physical appearance is frowning and terrible,’ a former inmate once wrote. ‘Its buildings are low-squatting, resembling the lines of a bull dog’ (in Streissguth 2005: 44). Today, Folsom Prison houses maximum-security inmates serving long sentences or those who are considered management problems at other facilities. The institution is severely overcrowded, with a population of 4,200 inmates living in spaces designed to hold 1,200. Some 500 inmates are triple-bunked in the hallways leading to the dining hall, where the Man in Black recorded his 1968 masterpiece, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. But entertaining convicts is a thing of the past. Cellblocks now teem with violence. Suicide and drug abuse are rampant. Four out of every ten prisoners suffer from Hepatitis C, thereby aggravating aggressive tendencies. There is a critical staff shortage. Most of the rehabilitation programmes have been eliminated, so prisoners spend their days pacing the sun-baked yard, pumping pig iron and bangin’ Crip, Blood, Mexican Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood, Nazi Low Rider. Seven out of ten inmates released from the prison return—one of the highest recidivism rates in the country. Even the state prison commissioner described the system as a ‘powder keg’ at risk of exploding (Steinhauer 2006). Criminologists who study failed prisons need only to look at Folsom for a model. Yet, out of this perilous environment has come an inmate-led rehabilitation programme of profound sociological depth.
The prophet of Repressa
Akil was born in Richmond, California, in 1970.2 His father was a black Baptist preacher, so Akil had a strict upbringing. Accordingly, his grades were excellent and he avoided the allure of drugs and gangs. Akil graduated at the top of his high school class in 1988 and he joined the Army, serving in various capacities in the United States and abroad until 1992. He began questioning his Christian faith during these years and developed an interest in Eastern religions, first studying Buddhism, then Taoism and finally Confucianism. Akil returned to Richmond in 1993. One night, he got into an argument with an acquaintance over an unpaid debt. A fight ensued and Akil beat the man unconscious. ‘Unfortunately,’ he says, ‘the guy died and I got life without parole.’ Akil arrived at Folsom Prison in June 1994, where he was celled up with a former LA Crip who had converted to Sunni Islam. During his processing, Akil was given an intelligence test that showed that he had an IQ of 140. This accelerated his spiritual searching. ‘My cellie had taught himself to read Arabic,’ says Akil. ‘And he taught me Arabic in two days. After that I read the entire Koran from cover to cover.’ Once the reading was completed, Akil asked the chaplain for information on Sunni Islam and, a short time later, he converted to the faith. ‘Islam helped me set boundaries,’ he said. ‘It taught me to have respect for others. It taught me to understand the true nature of humanity. It keeps me from doing the bad things of my past.’ Yet, this was not the end of Akil's searching. Sometime around 2000, he embarked upon a mission to read the voluminous writings of the eminent Arab scholar, Ibn Khaldun.
The Muqaddimah
Ibn Khaldun was born to a family of professional politicians in Tunis, on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, in 1332.3 Sincere in his reverence for traditional Islam and the dogmas and practices it had produced, Ibn Khaldun became a high-ranking government official, holding jurist posts in Granada, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. He spent a number of years among the Bedouins, and, in 1363, negotiated their case in the Spanish court of Pedro the Cruel (so named for perpetrating a series of ruthless murders). Each of Ibn Khaldun's postings ended in acrimony, however, and he was eventually exiled to a fortress in Algeria, where he began thinking about the bases of political power, concentrating on the rise and fall of empires. Ibn Khaldun's theoretical conclusions became the basis of his most famous book, the Muqaddimah (Introduction to Universal History, translated to English by Franz Rosenthal, Princeton University Press 1981). Ibn Khaldun argued that the history of the Arab world revolved around the Bedouins. These nomadic tribes had been forever locked in conflict with settled agricultural societies over the issue of mobility. Bedouins, who lived off grazing and hunting, had to be mobile and this prevented them from constructing a specialized economy. The mobility also created the tribal ethic of asabiya (kinship or tribal solidarity based on the innate psychological need to belong and give support to one or more leading personalities of a group), and the subsequent militarization of the tribes. When asabiya was reinforced by religion, its power to bond men to one another was multiplied. As the tribes grew, so did their military might, eventually outgrowing the military strength of armies hired to defend agricultural societies and the cities they served. As the Bedouins conquered agricultural societies, they appropriated their means of production. The key to this conquest was asabiya; hence, tribal solidarity had the power to transform a society's culture, ethics and economics. As the Bedouins became settled through the specialization of labour, however, the asabiya ethic deteriorated. Once tribal solidarity was broken, the society became vulnerable to raids from Bedouins who still roamed the desert. According to Ibn Khaldun, these social laws had universal validity. Historical processes are defined by cyclical change brought on by the interaction of nomads and townspeople. Nomads are tough, savage and uncultured. Although they are inimical to civilization, nomads are also hardy, frugal, morally incorruptible, freedom-loving and self-reliant. Conversely, towns are centres of commerce, science, arts and culture; such luxuries corrupt its inhabitants, though, making them a liability to the state.
Four-hundred years before Marx published his theory of class struggle (The Communist Manifesto 1848), Ibn Khaldun had developed a model of social conflict. It argues that social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups due to the existence of prophets—a succession of chosen human beings who are transmitters of a divine message. Cohesion is then enlarged and intensified by the religious convictions of tribesmen. Yet, group cohesion contains within it the seeds of the group's destruction. When a society becomes a great civilization, its high point will be followed by a period of social decay. Social decay diminishes the civilization and, in time, it will be conquered by barbarians. Once barbarians solidify their control over the conquered society, they become attracted to its more refined aspects (literacy, the arts and acquiring wealth). Solidarity is then compromised and the arts of defending oneself and of attacking the enemy are forgotten. And, within a period of three generations (or about 120 years), the former barbarians will be conquered by a new set of barbarians, who will repeat the process. ‘States are like men,’ Ibn Khaldun wrote. ‘You cannot revitalize them when they begin to die’ (in al-Barghouti 2003: 4). In this way, the Muqqadimah can be read as a general philosophy applicable to any series of historical events at different times or in different places.
New barbarians
Since converting to Sunni Islam, Akil has been a model inmate. Chaplains extol his virtues and fellow prisoners speak openly of his sway. As far as I can tell, he is a charismatic genius. Perhaps because of this, Akil now leads the Islamic Studies Program at Folsom. In this capacity, Akil trains other prisoners as teachers based upon what he calls the ‘Three R's’—Rehabilitation, Repentance and Reform. The Islamic Studies Program not only provides prisoners with a viable rehabilitation programme, but it also serves as a countervailing weight against Islamic extremism. In 2007, there was only one chaplain for every 2,000 inmates at Folsom Prison. One part-time cleric was assigned to the Muslims; he was responsible for roughly 10 per cent of the Islamic instruction. Akil and his team of inmate teachers were responsible for 90 per cent of the instruction. ‘We can't rely on the prison to rehabilitate us,’ says Akil. ‘So we have to do it ourselves. I get help with my self-help groups because I have the foundation’:
MH: Can you explain that foundation?The Muqaddimah concentrates on asabiya, the sprit of cohesion that allowed generations of barbarians to conquer civilized societies. Akil and his followers see themselves as the new barbarians of this epic struggle. They are inimical to civilization (indeed, most of them are poor black men who will spend the rest of their lives in prison) but they also view themselves as hungry, lean and pious—closer to God precisely because of their suffering. It is not hard to understand their veneration of the Muqqaddimah. Toynbee wrote that Ibn Khaldun had become an ‘immortal philosopher whose thought still lives in the mind of every reader of the Muqqaddimah’ (Toynbee 1962: 328). Ibn Khaldun lived in an age when Arab civilization was struggling to bring order out of the chaos of failed states. This led Toynbee to invoke Hobbes's famous dictum when he wrote that Ibn Khaldun was ‘the one outstanding personality in the history of a civilization whose social life on the whole was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"’ (Toynbee 1962: 322). From Ibn Khaldun's perspective, asabiya offered hope for transcending this existential agony. Akil and the new barbarians are trying to transcend physical and human limitations that may be every bit as cruel as those experienced by Ibn Khaldun. Like David versus Goliath, they are pitted against the civilized and powerful—namely representatives of a law-and-order bureaucracy who function on the left-over scraps of wealth, culture, technology and reason generated by the State of California. This is a weak civilization—one that has subverted God's will and lost its moral fibre through decadence and conspicuous consumption, its agents becoming sedentary and weak, tyrannical and sinful. But, more to the point of Akil's struggle, it is a state that has failed to live up to its moral obligation to provide transgressors with the opportunity to pursue their reformation. This is the hallmark of a failed prison, yet it suggests something more. Toynbee noted that the failure of a civilization to survive is the result of its inability to respond to such moral and religious challenges.Akil: The Muqaddimah. Everything we need is in the Muqaddimah.
‘Overcrowding is the main problem here,’ said a Folsom chaplain. ‘It affects everything we do, foremost among them the way we deliver services to the Muslims .... The Nation of Islam is the biggest problem. They pressure inmates to convert. Their preachers encourage inmates to overthrow the government.’ Another chaplain expanded on these themes: ‘We are called on by the administration to monitor Muslim preachers who come into the prison. The problem is that many of these volunteers go over our heads to get credentials. Also, we get no gang intelligence down here [in the chapel]. There is no officer presence in the chapel. Yet we have to abide by the chaplain's code: We won't permit one religious group to speak negatively about another.’
These chaplains face enormous obstacles. The burden of overcrowding, the strident voices coming out of the Nation of Islam, the lack of security and role conflicts between chaplaincy and intelligence—all of these factors have led the chaplains to believe that the best way of providing Islamic services is not by relying on volunteer clerics from the community, but by turning to Muslim prisoners led by Akil. ‘In the JIS case,’ says the second chaplain quoted above, ‘inmates were disenchanted with the religious offerings they received from the institution. To avoid that problem again, we must offer inmates something they are not disenchanted with.’ Volunteer clergy are not the solution to this problem because they cannot be controlled. But Akil and his followers will control themselves if they are allowed to remain active and authentic representatives of inmate concerns about Islam. In this way, then, the Islamic Studies Program is a prophylactic against radicalism and terrorist recruitment.
In addition to gaining the administration's respect for his service to Folsom Prison, Akil has appeared on CNN, PBS's FRONTLINE and the Discovery Channel, sharing his views on inmate Islam with worldwide audiences. Not surprisingly, Akil's observations reflect elements of an indigenous Khaldunian sociology, where Islam creates a worldly social network and sense of purpose equal to that of asabiya, as he explains below:
The potential for radicalization is there, no doubt. But there is no one from the outside who will radicalize us. That can only happen from the inside. Maximum security is more likely to produce radical prisoners because there is more violence in this environment. Yards are so politically charged these days, so guys who teach Islam teach from that perspective. They have to in order to maintain their credibility with inmates .... The potential for radicalization must be understood on a one-to-one basis, because nobody's going to risk going radical in a public place .... You must remember: Islam has always been shaped by the environment in which it is practiced. Prison is no different. As long as you can keep the environment right, you can avoid having radical Muslims.
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This research can be summarized in two cases that came to light in the Age of Sacred Terror—both of which emerged from the ‘bottom-up’ influence of prisoners themselves, rather than from the ‘top-down’ influence of prison outsiders. On one hand, we have JIS of New Folsom Prison, a Sunni-inspired form of Prison Islam led by a charismatic inmate who adopted the beliefs and terrorist tactics of al-Qaeda. On the other hand, we have the Islamic Studies Program (ISP) of Old Folsom, a traditional form of Sunni Islam led by a charismatic inmate who adopted a prisoner de-radicalization agenda.
Scholars such as Christian Perenti and Noam Chomsky identify several key factors associated with failed states, one being the ascension of religious millenarianism. The same development was witnessed in the two failed prisons at Repressa. Kevin James and JIS responded to the conservative eighteenth-century reformist call of Wahhabism, thereby rejecting medieval interpretations of Islam. History reveals that Wahhabis are much more willing than the traditional Islamic schools to declare other Muslims to be unbelievers and wage jihad against them (Lewis 2003). James's ire was, therefore, directed not only against those outside the faith, but against those whom he saw as betraying and degrading Islam from within. In addition to waging a terrorist plot against the US government, James called for attacks against fellow prisoners who belonged to the Nation of Islam, as well as Shiites and Muslim prison guards (USA v. Kevin James, SA CR 05–214-CJC). Akil and the ISP had no such agenda. They immersed themselves in the reckonings of a fourteenth-century sociologist (arguably the world's first sociologist), thereby embracing medieval interpretations of Islam, stressing the social perspective rather than the theological, especially the reciprocal relationships between group solidarity and religion, human labour and socio-economic stratification.
The first case confirms the alarmist point of view and has generated widespread media coverage and policy interest. The second case confirms the reassuring viewpoint and shows that inmates themselves can potentially do more than the state to prevent prisoner radicalization. Akil's television appearances notwithstanding, though, the reassuring viewpoint has received almost no attention in media and policy circles.4
How do we explain this? Here are two answers.
The myth of Wahhabi imperialism
First, law enforcement and intelligence officials have generally ignored the reassuring position as a valid starting point for counter-terrorism policy. Instead, they have focused on the alarmist position—that inmate Islam poses a danger to national security, the source of which can be traced to radical clerics of the Wahhabi tradition. In the words of a high-ranking FBI counter-terrorism official, prisoner radicalization occurs ‘through anti-U.S. sermons provided by contract, volunteer or staff imams’ (Van Duyn 2006). Officials have, therefore, attempted to construct barriers to prevent this from happening. Foremost among them is the development of intelligence on prisoner radicalization and potential terrorist plots derived mainly from confidential informants, known among inmates as jailhouse ‘snitches’.
This strategy has produced mixed results, due to any number of problems. They include prison gang politics and the difficulty of recruiting snitches from their ranks; a lack of law enforcement mentality in corrections; technological incompetence; and overcrowding. In California, for example, all law enforcement functions are managed by the Office of Correctional Safety (OCS), including criminal investigations, fugitive apprehension and gang management as well as the detection, prevention and deterrence of prisoner radicalization. All of these duties fall to 125 gang investigators under OCS authority. The scope of their work is staggering. There are more than 300,000 inmates, wards and parolees in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (accounting for a population nearly four times the size of Britain's prison population). They generate an estimated 5.8 million visiting, telephone, financial, incident and movement data-points annually. An estimated 20,000 inmates belong to gangs (Hamm 2007b). ‘Terrorist screening, investigation and assessment do not exist in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,’ said the head of OCS. ‘The issue just came to the fore with the JIS case. We've been more worried about the southern Mexicans assaulting northerners on a daily basis.’ The OCS attributes its lack of intelligence to the total absence of a management information system. ‘We have no computer system in place to monitor inmates,’ lamented the OCS chief inside his Sacramento office—a short drive from Silicon Valley and the corporate offices of Microsoft. ‘We have no technical sophistication. We have only paper files or we rely on phone calls.’
Enemy construction
The second reason why the reassuring viewpoint has been disregarded relates to the instrumentality of doing so. Recently, the FBI completed assessments at 2,088 correctional facilities across the United States. Among its findings, the FBI determined that there was not a JIS-like pattern of terrorist recruitment in US prisons (see Trout 2007). Indeed, the FBI could find no pattern of terrorist recruitment whatsoever. This is because terrorist recruitment is a problem so atypical of everyday prison life that it defies prediction. In 2004, there were some 7 million people in US jails or prisons, or on probation or parole. Exactly one of them (a JIS parolee from New Folsom, named Levar Washington) was recruited into an actual terrorist plot. Identifying one person out of 7 million is impossible. Yet, such a claim is heretical to the US security establishment. Consider the testimony of Michael Waller, Annenberg Professor at the Institute of World Politics, before the United States Senate in 2003:
Radical Islamist groups, most tied to Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi organizations suspected by the U.S. government of being closely linked to terror financing activities, dominate Muslim prison recruitment in the U.S. and seek to create a radicalized cadre of felons who will support their anti-American efforts. Estimates place the number of Muslim prison recruits at between 15–20% of the prison population. (Waller 2003)This is the essence of the alarmist position. Not only do radical Islamists dominate recruitment into Muslim prisoner populations in the United States, but these inmates are being actively recruited into terrorist networks by international Wahhabists. An estimated 460,000 Muslim prisoners (15–20 per cent of the US prison population) are susceptible to recruitment into these terrorist networks. Moreover, the threat posed by Muslim converts is substantial. Yet, Waller's claims are based on reasoning by analogy, rather than empirically based field research. He offers no explanation for his numerical estimate; no case studies of radicalization and terrorist recruitment; no interviews with wardens, intelligence officers, chaplains or prisoners. In fact, there is no reason to believe that Waller has ever set foot inside a prison.
Long before the 9/11 attacks, Abraham Miller made the sobering observation that ‘The literature on the subject of terrorism has become part of a propaganda war where objectivity has been unabashedly replaced by advocacy’ (Miller 1989: 391–2). In this vein, Waller and the other alarmists provide something very useful for prosecuting the current war on terrorism. President Bush declared on numerous occasions that the war on terrorism is a war without end (the ‘long war’, as he briefly called it). In fact, President Bush is on record saying the war on terrorism is un-winnable.5 Therefore, as Naomi Wolf (2007) points out, the United States must identify, mythologize and institutionalize both an external and internal threat to its security—indefinitely. ‘Radical Muslim prisoners’—with a mythology of dangerousness anchored in the black power activism of yesteryear—provide the necessary internal threat needed to sustain indefinite war.
Summary
This, then, is the state of prisoner radicalization in the United States. What happens inside correctional institutions is now a matter of national security. Authorities search for Wahhabi imperialists and their supplicants through inmate snitch systems that have been rendered largely ineffective by the exigencies of correctional bureaucracy. These modest efforts nevertheless serve the larger government strategy of modern-day witch hunting against Wahhabi clerics as a way of shoring up its own authority in a global war on terrorism that has alienated much of the world. Meanwhile, radicalization continues in the secretive underground of inmate subcultures through prison gangs and extremist interpretations of religious doctrines that inspire ideologies of intolerance, hatred and violence. As resources are expended in the search for prison outsiders, the root causes of radicalization—overcrowded maximum security prisons with few rehabilitation programmes and a shortage of chaplains to provide religious guidance to spiritual searchers—are ignored. Only a small percentage of converts to Islam—primarily fresh converts, the newly pious, with an abundance of emotion and feeling—turn their radical beliefs into terrorist action (Stern 2003). The lesson of the JIS case is that it is not the sheer number of prisoners following extremist interpretations of religious doctrines that poses a threat; rather, it is the potential for charismatic leaders to radicalize small groups of prisoners into support networks for terrorist goals upon release.
The lesson of the Islamic Studies Program, on the other hand, is that a grass-roots inmate-led rehabilitation movement may be evolving from the same conditions that spawn prison extremism. Encouraging these self-help efforts with institutional support could go a long way in resolving the problem of terrorist recruitment behind bars.
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National Institute of Justice, US Department of Justice (NCJ 220957).
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Special thanks to Akil of the Islamic Studies Program at Folsom Prison as well as Folsom Chaplains Dennis Morino, Larry West and Ira Book. Thanks also to Edna Erez, Kate Painter, Kristi Cooper, Lindsay Clutterbuck, Charles Strozier and Bert Useem. Views expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of NIJ.
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1 There is considerable social psychological evidence to confirm this position. Studies show that involvement in religion contributes to feelings of well-being, reduces stress and increases general health (e.g. Ellison et al. 2001; Idler 1995).
2 Last names are prohibited by Institutional Review Board policy on human subjects.
3 The following is based on the works of Baali (1988); al-Bargouti (2003); Issawi and Leaman (1998); and Toynbee (1962).
4 This despite the fact that a recent national survey shows that more than half of all prison wardens acknowledge permitting inmates to serve as spiritual leaders (Knox 2005).
5 During an interview with NBC's Matt Lauer in 2004, the President was asked if the war on terrorism could be won. ‘I don't think you can win it,’ Bush said. ‘But I think you can create the conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world, let's put it that way’ (Draper 2007: 357).
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