The enemy within

The horrifying news of an American soldier gunned down at a Little Rock Army recruitment center has left many asking why. The answer may be shocking to some: The prison made me do it.

In an outline of his defense strategy for accused murderer Carlos Bledsoe, attorney Jim Hensley told reporters that his client was "radicalized" by Islamic fundamentalists in a Yemeni prison, where he spent four months last year after overstaying his visa. It is a plausible scenario. But here's the sad truth: Thousands of inmates are radicalized by Islam every year, and it is happening in prisons right here in the United States.

Most recently, the four men arrested in an alleged plot to blow up New York synagogues and military targets were radicalized Muslims who had spent time in the U.S. prison system. In fact, at least two of them converted to Islam during stretches in prison.

While about 1 in 100 Americans claims to be Muslim, six times as many American prisoners identify as Muslim. As many as 40,000 American prison inmates convert to Islam every year.

The problem isn't so much that prisoners are converting to Islam, it's the particular form of Islam they are embracing: one that preaches hatred of Jews, Christians and all infidels and violence against America.

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Former FBI Director Robert Mueller has called America's prisons "fertile ground for extremists." A highly regarded 2006 study called "Out of the Shadows" found that "tight knit communities of Muslims in prison are ripe for radicalization, and could easily become terrorist cells." Several of the 9/11 terrorists were products of America's prison system, and in 2002, terrorism expert Peter Brown stated that as many as 2,000 American recruits "have shown up in the ranks of al-Qaida in the past decade."

In 2006 testimony to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Dr. Gregory B. Saathoff, co-chair of the Prisoner Radicalization Task Force, stated, "While the federal prison system has made great strides in addressing the issues of religious radicalization and recruitment within prisons, our level of awareness and understanding is still quite limited, particularly at the level of the state prisons, community corrections and local jails."

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It is not hard to understand why radical Islam thrives in prison, where alienated young men with propensities for violence form a captive audience for Muslim clerics offering a sense of family and purpose. But Prison Fellowship Ministries founder Chuck Colson has written that radical Islam "feeds on resentment and anger," and that prisoners "who take the Quran seriously are taught to hate the Christian and the Jew … [a]nd [that] dying in a jihad is the only way one can be assured of Allah's forgiveness and eternal salvation."

In many cases, American prisons aren't helping themselves. Federal prisons have a history of relying on Muslim chaplains trained in Wahhabism, a particularly extreme branch of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.

In 2008, the Federal Bureau of Prisons completed an inventory of Islamic books and videos in Muslim chapel libraries in 105 federal correctional institutions. It discovered hundreds of volumes by jihadist and Islamist writers that were replete with anti-Christian and anti-Western language and calls to violence.

There are steps we can take to help stop the spread of radical Islam in our prisons. Some relatively simple measures include better supervision of prisoner use of the Internet, where radical literature can be found, as well as prohibiting the use of Arabic language and script, which are often used by Muslims in prison to communicate secretly and hide extremist rhetoric.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons should also update their background checks and incorporate "ideology checks" to ensure that the views of Islamic chaplains do not foment a culture of radicalization in prisons.

Bigger, long-term goals should include improving overall prison security. Often, much time and many resources are devoted to controlling tensions among rival prison gangs, which leaves less time to monitor prisoners' reading materials and religious practices.

Finally, there is a need for better social support services for newly released prisoners, to help them re-integrate into their communities at that crucial time just after leaving prison.

Exemplary work by the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorist Task Force helped thwart a homegrown terrorist attack in New York, while FBI surveillance of Bledsoe failed to prevent his vicious attack.

But if the U.S. is serious about preventing future terrorist attacks on American soil, it needs to reform the culture of Islamic radicalization running rampant in America's prison system.

Gary Bauer is president of American Values and chairman of Campaign for Working Families.