The deadly attacks at a synagogue and free-speech event in Copenhagen over the weekend are renewing fears that U.S. prisons could be serving as fertile recruiting ground for Islamic extremists.
Danish authorities had been tracking the gunman and were alerted last year that he was likely radicalized in prison, but the country’s intelligence service said it had no indication that he was planning an attack.
The three gunmen in the recent Paris had similar backgrounds of deepening radical Islamic views while in jail.
After three distinct but coordinated attacks in the French capital that killed 17 people in mid-January, French officials vowed to create a plan to stop the prison radicalization and isolate extremist inmates from other criminals.
In the United States, experts say, little has been done over the last decade to investigate the spread of Islamic extremism inside U.S. prisons despite incidents that appear linked to prison radicalization.
The White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism this week hasn’t addressed the topic, and Justice Department programs launched during the Bush administration to investigate Islamic extremist recruiting among inmates never produced a comprehensive report.
In 2010, James Larry, who had converted to Islam while serving a prison sentence in Wisconsin for a weapons conviction, killed his mother, pregnant wife, child and two nieces for refusing to convert to Islam.
Last summer, Alton Nolen, who is believed to have converted to Islam in prison, beheaded a fellow employee, 54-year-old factory worker in Oklahoma, with a produce knife, reportedly shouting Quranic phrases as he carried out the killing.
And in October Zale Thompson killed a New York Police officer with a hatchet, a savage act New York Police Commissioner William Bratton called a terrorist attack. Police are investigating whether his conversion and radicalization occurred while he was serving sentences in California prisons.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says homegrown terrorism — those radicalized online who may go on to carry out lone-wolf style attacks such as the 2009 Fort Hood killings — is her greatest national security concern.
Collins sponsored three congressional hearings on prison radicalization between 2006 and 2008, but she says the U.S. prison system still hasn’t done enough to screen radical self-styled imams who visit prisons or the literature they bring to inmates.
In the decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, prison radicalization was a hot topic with law enforcement authorities uncovering several incidents of Islamic extremists joining forces in prison to plot attacks once they were released.
In response to the perceived threat, the Justice Department in 2004 even formed the Correctional Intelligence Initiative, a program that was supposed to gather information on the number of Islamic extremist recruits and the type of material they were receiving from the outside world.
But the initiative never produced a report or publicized its findings in any form, says Pat Dunleavy, the former deputy inspector general for the New York State Department of Corrections, and author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad.
Dunleavy spent several years investigating terrorism recruitment efforts in the New York state system and says he is now worried that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s social media propaganda and efforts to incite violence through lone actors could heighten the threat of inmate radicalization.
“[The Islamic State] has kind of thrown the door open and said just go out and commit acts of violence,” he said.
In contrast, over the last decade, al Qaeda and other groups would carefully vet any prison recruits before communicating directly with them by monitoring their visits to U.S. mosques and madrasas before sending them overseas for further training.
Making matters worse, Dunleavy said, inmates are gaining access to smuggled smartphones where they can have access to Islamic State recruiting on Twitter and other social media platforms.
“The main contraband issue in both federal and state prisons right now is cell phones — smartphones with Internet access,” he said. “They’re not supposed to have them, but they do.”
Dunleavy, who spent 26 years working in New York State’s Department of Correctional Services, said Islamic extremists have been recruiting in U.S. prisons for years. He said only a small fraction of inmates who get out are willing to pledge loyalty to the Islamic State or al Qaeda and commit violent acts.
In his book, Dunleavy chronicles the prison recruiting activity of a Palestinian named Abdel Nasser Zaben who was incarcerated in New York City for kidnapping and robbery in 1993.
Through the seemingly insulated environment of prison, Zaben swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden and began to convert other prisoners to the cause using his apprentice role in the prison’s chaplain’s office as a cover.
Daniel Pipes, a terrorism expert at the Middle East Forum, argues that radicalization in prison is a real and growing problem but says it’s difficult, if not impossible, to quantify because prison systems don’t keep track of how many prisoners convert and whether they adhere to extreme, anti-American views.
“Some people convert in prison, some Muslims arrive in prisons as Muslims but are radicalized and some become leaders in prison recruiting others” while still others pretend to convert just to gain protection, Pipes said.
Others argue that the threat from prison radicalization is overblown and cast in imprecise, broad-brush and alarmist terms.
SpearIt, an associate professor at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, says there are no reliable statistics on Islamic radicalization in prison, although he has studied the issue extensively and estimates that 35,000 to 40,000 inmates convert to Islam each year.
Still, he says, many of the examples cited in the news, such as the Paris shooters and the Nolen case in Oklahoma, were either radicalized before they went to prison or mentally deranged and committing crimes beforehand.
“Prison was just a pit stop for these individuals — there’s no proof that the people were radicalized because of prison,” SpearIt said.
SpearIt also argues that there is no systematic approach by al Qaeda or the Islamic State to radicalize U.S. prison inmates.
Steven Emerson, a leading expert on Islamic extremist networks and the executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, agrees that the Islamic State and even al Qaeda have yet to lay out a grand plan to target prisons. But he said the threat of prison radicalization is real.
Emerson’s group has used Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain the pamphlets and materials imams have circulated in prisons over the last decade. These included tapes and CDs of lectures from Osama bin Laden, Muslim Brotherhood leaders, and Anwar Awlaki, the now-deceased Islamic militant and prolific recruiter who operated out of Northern Virginia before returning to Yemen.
“It’s been demonstrated over and over again, that prison radicalization is a problem not only in the U.S. but in Europe as well,” he said. “It’s a problem of the curricula and what’s being taught by the imams who are really not vetted.”
