http://ctx.sagepub.com/Contexts http://ctx.sagepub.com/content/11/2/34The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/1536504212446458 2012 11: 34ContextsBert UseemU.S. Prisons and the Myth of Islamic Terrorism Published by: http://www.sagepublications.comOn behalf of: American Sociological Association can be found at:ContextsAdditional services and information for http://ctx.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts: http://ctx.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions: What is This? - May 18, 2012Version of Record >> at Texas A&M University - Medical Sciences Library on April 15, 2014ctx.sagepub.comDownloaded from at Texas A&M University - Medical Sciences Library on April 15, 2014ctx.sagepub.comDownloaded fromu.s. prisons and the myth of islami terrorism by bert useem at Texas A&M University - Medical Sciences Library on April 15, 2014ctx.sagepub.comDownloaded from35SPRING 2012 contextsIn October 2003, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Tech-nology, and Homeland Security held hearings, warning that Islamic radicalization of prisoners is producing a formidable enemy within. Eight years later, in June 2011, the U.S. House Committee on Home-land Security held another series of hearings on the issue. In his opening remarks, Committee Chairman Peter King claimed that prisons have created “an assembly line of radicalization,” which poses a major threat to the safety and security of the United States.Many pundits, politicians, and law enforcement officials consider prisons to be breeding grounds for terrorism. A plau-sible argument for the causal connection between prison and terrorism is not difficult to construct. Prisons, by design, are “bad” places to live. Their day-to-day operations are authori-tarian, and their amenities and comforts are few. In this age of mass incarceration, prisons are often over-crowded. Resent-ment inevitably builds as prisoners come to hate “us”—unin-carcerated citizens, law enforcement, and the government. They may act on that hatred, the story goes, by participating in mass political violence. In the past, collective prison violence was expressed through internal rebellions, such as the famous riots that occurred at Attica in 1971 and in New Mexico in 1980. Today, prisoners’ thirst for rebellion is more likely to be channeled into Islamic terrorism—or so many believe. But do prisons actually breed terrorism in the U.S.? prison radicalizationIt’s not enough to show that some domestic Islamic ter-rorists have been prisoners. Serving time is no longer an uncommon experience, especially among those who are likely to become involved in Islamic domestic terrorism. By random chance alone, some terrorists will have prison records—just as some terrorists will have played dodge ball, or performed in a high school band. A more precise question is whether U.S. domestic terrorists come disproportionately from prisons. To explore this, we need to know the demographics of both the current and former prison populations. The average state prisoner serves 2.5 years in prison, and 44 percent of state prisoners are released in a given year. At the end of 2001, 1.3 million adults were serving time, and there were an addi-tional 4.3 million former prisoners living in this country. In other words, one out of every 37 adults—or 2.7 percent of the total U.S. population—has been imprisoned at some point. Popu-lation subgroups, such as racial minority men—from which prison-radicalized Islamic terrorists are disproportionately drawn—have even higher rates of current or past imprison-ment. In 2001, 5 percent of all adult males, 17 percent of adult black males, and 8 percent of Hispanic males were current or former prisoners. If prisons in fact breed Islamic terrorism, one would expect to see large numbers of prison-radicalized terrorists. Even if being imprisoned has a negligible impact on the rise of Islamic terrorism in this country, sheer chance alone would mean that a certain number of Islamic terrorists would have served time in prison. But if we take a closer look at the numbers, we see that the threat has been exaggerated.doing the numbers Using open sources, criminologist Mark Hamm assembled an exhaustive data set documenting cases of prison-based terrorism against Western targets. He identified 46 cases of prison-radicalized terrorists over a 41-year period, including both Islamic and other types of terrorists. For each case, he collected data on year of attack, religious conversion, ethnicity, age, and the nature of plot.Let’s take Hamm’s data-set, but exclude those who were Contexts, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 34-39. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2012 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504212446458 at Texas A&M University - Medical Sciences Library on April 15, 2014ctx.sagepub.comDownloaded from36contexts.orgradicalized in a prison outside the United States (for example, “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid, who was incarcerated in Brit-ain); those who operated before 9/11 (Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, for one); individuals who were involved in politi-cal extremism that is unrelated to Islamic terrorism (such as members of the Aryan Circle); and those were incarcerated in a U.S. detention center because of alleged terrorist activi-ties (such as Said Ali al-Shihri, who was captured at the Paki-stan-Afghanistan border and held as an “enemy combatant” in Guantanamo Bay from 2002 to 2007). This leaves us with 14 individuals who appear to have been influenced by Islamic radicalism in U.S. prisons during the post 9/11 period. Eleven of these individuals are African-Americans, one is Caucasian, one is Hispanic/African-American, and one is African-Haitian. Sociologist Charles Kurzman, also working with open source data, found that a total of 161 Muslim-Americans com-mitted acts of terrorism-related violence, or were prosecuted for terrorism-related offenses from 9/11 through the end of 2010. Of these 161 men, if 14 were radicalized (as my reassess-ment of Hamm’s data suggests) one might conclude that about 9 percent of American Islamic terrorists in the post-9/11 period could have been radicalized in prison. But given the current size of the prison population, this number is not very different from the