Frightening claims are being made that U.S. prisons are breeding grounds for Islamic terrorism. The premise is that the dangerous and unstable people who populate prisons can all too easily be swept into radical religion and terrorism. A 17-person blue-ribbon task force, assembled by researchers from George Washington University and the University of Virginia Medical School, issued a report in 2006 that concluded that because Islam feeds on bitterness and alienation (now ubiquitous in American prisons) the United States "is at risk of facing the sort of homegrown terrorism currently plaguing other countries." Ian Cuthbertson, the director of the Counterterrorism Program at the World Policy Institute, makes similar claims, calling prisons an ideal place for recruitment into jihadist organizations. Just as prisons are "schools for crime," he says, in which petty offenders "graduate" into more serious criminal careers, so too our prisons have become "universities" for advanced training in terrorism.
Based on recent field research, including extensive interviews of inmates and prison staff in state and federal prisons, I have come to a far less pessimistic assessment. My research, conducted with Obie Clayton of Morehouse College, involved visits to 27 prisons in nine jurisdictions. In total, we interviewed 200 prison officials and 270 inmates. Our central finding is that the rate of prisoner radicalization is not just low but falling. Those on the inside--inmates, line correctional officers, intelligence officers, and senior administrators--consistently report that not only is inmate radicalization far below the alarmists' claims, but barely a trace can be found.
The primary reason is the increased safety and order in U.S. prisons. As Anne Piehl and I reported last spring in THE WEEKLY STANDARD (see "The Other Big Crime Drop" in the April 28, 2008 issue), the quadrupling of the prison population over the past 30 years has been associated with increased safety and security behind bars. Across a wide set of measures, U.S. corrections has become safer and more orderly. For example, in 1972, there were over 90 prison riots. By 2005, prison riots had become rare, almost to the point of disappearing. The prison homicide rate is now lower than the homicide rate for the U.S. population. (This lower prison homicide rate exists before adjusting for demographics, not to mention criminality.) Prisons have become zones of safety--not the dangerous snake pits that New York Times crime reporter Fox Butterfield has portrayed as close cousins to the abuses uncovered in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib.
Prisoner radicalization is like any other challenge to corrections officials, from gangs and crowding to high rates of inmate violence and inmate suicide. These are problems to be attacked and solved, rather than inevitable or overwhelming circumstances.
The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, for example, stresses down to the lowest staff levels the importance of watching for signs of radicalization and reporting them up the chain of command. A central office collects and collates this information, and ensures the flow of information to and from external law enforcement. We interviewed inmates in the state's two toughest high security prisons and one medium security prison. (The two high security facilities were largely out of control a decade ago; both are now relatively safe and orderly.) No signs of Islamic radicalization appeared in any of the three prisons. The greater order achieved during the prison buildup, moreover, would allow officials to quickly see, and do something about, any signs of radicalization.
Our interviews also suggest that inmates, as a whole, are patriotic, or more precisely "individually disloyal patriots"--that is, they do not see themselves as bound by the laws of society, but do not take delight in damaging the country. While they are willing to exploit criminal opportunities, they do not perceive American society as the enemy. One inmate stated, "Even though we're criminals, we see ourselves as Americans. Couldn't turn against this country." Some inmates even said that they would see it as their duty to report to authorities if they learned of a terrorist cell within the prison. This sentiment, however, was moderated by a (perhaps) stronger antipathy toward "snitches."
Whatever the balance between the two sentiments, most inmates describe prison as a hostile environment for the formation of a radical cell. An inmate in a maximum-security prison told us, "If someone comes in slanting toward terrorism, we will know before the officers. This is our house, and we were all born Americans."
Also inhibiting inmate radicalization is the social standing of the estimated 2.5 to 3 million Muslims in America. For the most part, Muslim Americans are solidly middle class. Forty-one percent have household incomes of $50,000 or more, about even with the rate of the population as a whole (44 percent). This is in sharp contrast to the Muslim populations in Great Britain, France, Germany, and Spain, which are much less affluent than the general populations of those countries. In surveys, Muslim Americans express generally positive views of their own lives and American society. There are not large pockets of radicals found in the general Islamic population. For radicalization to take place behind bars, U.S. prisoners would have to reach further, to foreign lands and cultures, to find groups with which to identify. This is outside the realm of possibility of most inmates.
Prisons bring together society's most dangerous, and often deeply troubled, individuals. The claims that prisons are breeding grounds for terrorism have it backward. Those individuals truly dangerous to the country will certainly be more, not less, dangerous if left on the streets. Behind bars, they will be incapacitated for a period and, if all goes well, perhaps even turned around. The fact that prison authorities have been able to create a relatively safe environment is a tribute to their skill and dedication. An unanticipated benefit of these efforts is lowering the risk of homegrown terrorism.
Bert Useem is a professor of sociology at Purdue University. He is the author, with Anne Morrison Piehl, of Prison State: The Challenge of Mass Incarceration.