Conversion to Islam in U.S. prisons

Black Muslim organizations, such as The Nation of Islam and Moorish Science Temple of America, formally began prison outreach efforts in 1942.[2] However evidence suggests that Muslims may have comprised a small fraction of the inmate populate in the United States as early as the 1910s.[3] New research brought to light an African immigrant inmate at San Quentin State Prison named Lucius Lehman, who was proclaiming himself to be a Muslim religious leader during his incarceration from 1910-1924.[3] Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad himself was incarcerated in the early 1940s when he was convicted of draft evasion.[4] Elijah Muhammad's organization would later gain its most famous convert, Malcolm X, who took interest in the Black Muslim movement while also incarcerated in the 1950s.

A small but steady stream of conversions occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s.[2] In New York, evidence of Sunni Muslims worshiping openly in the state's correctional facilities appeared in the 1960s.[5] These inmates reached out to a local New York Muslim community called Darul Islam for assistance, which eventually led to an active Muslim-based prison ministry and educational program forming in the state.[5] Muslim prison outreach efforts during this era sought to instill values of honesty, hard work, individual responsibility, and mechanisms for dealing with rehabilitation as well as coping with drug and alcohol abuse.[2] Despite the growth of conversions, states such as California[2] and New York[5] still had not yet recognized or accommodated the religious activity of Muslim inmates. As incarcerated Muslims began to reach a critical mass, prisoners petitioned courts to advance their religious rights.[2] Cases involving Muslim prisoners began succeeding in gaining recognition for a variety of rights over the next several years, such as freedom from punishment due to religion, the right to hold religious services, the right to possess and wear religious medals, and the right to proselytize.[2] New York's Department of Corrections offered to hire Muslim chaplains as department employees by 1975.[5]

In addition to immigration, the state, federal and local prisons of the United States may be a contributor to the growth of Islam in the United States. J. Michael Waller claims that Muslim inmates comprise 17–20% of the prison population in New York, or roughly 350,000 inmates in 2003. He also claims that 80% of the prisoners who find faith while in prison convert to Islam.[6] These converted inmates are mostly African American, with a growing Hispanic minority.[7] According to a 2003 estimate by FBI, there are 350,000 Muslims in federal, state and local prison, about 30,000 - 40,000 more being converted every year.[8]

Muslims prisoners have been characterized as a danger or threat for radicalization in the media.[2] Yet despite the fact of there being over 350,000 Muslim inmates in the United States, little evidence indicates widespread radicalization or foreign recruitment.[2] Rather, research has shown that Islam has a long history of positive influence on prisoners, including supporting inmate rehabilitation for decades.[2] An early example of this type of characterizations from the media is a article in The New York Times that alleged Imam Warith Deen Umar, Islamic chaplain for the New York State prison system, was reported to have praised the September 11 attacks; prompting members of Congress to call for an investigation.[9] The article states that in a 2004 report, the Justice Department faulted the prison system for failing to protect against "infiltration by religious extremists." However, the report made clear that the problem was not chaplains, but rather unsupervised inmates.[9] In January 2010, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator John Kerry, released a report that stated as many as three dozen formerly incarcerated individuals who converted to Islam in American prisons have moved to Yemen where they could pose a "significant threat".[10][11] However no documentation or verifiable evidence was provided to back up the committee's report (even though the report stated the individuals traveled to apparently learn Arabic)[10]—rather it was simply accepted and invoked as evidence.[2] Another example of such characterization comes from Annenberg Professor of International Communication J. Michael Waller, who asserted that outside Islamist groups linked to terrorism are attempting to radicalize Muslim converts in prison, but other experts suggest that when radicalization does occur, it has little to no connection with these outside interests.[12][13][14]

• Conversion to Islam in prisons
• Religion in United States prisons
• Islamic Missionary Activity
• Jihadist extremism in the United States#Prison
• Islam in the African diaspora

• Felber, Garrett. 2018. "“Shades of Mississippi”: The Nation of Islam's Prison Organizing, the Carceral State, and the Black Freedom Struggle." Journal of American History 105(1): 71–95.
• Felber, Garrett. 2020. Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State. University of North Carolina Press.

• Why American prisoners convert to Islam, This is Life with Lisa Ling on CNN
• ""Homegrown: Islam In Prison" Explores the Rise and Influence of the Muslim Faith in the U.S. Penal System". WETA. 2007-11-26. Retrieved 2018-02-04.
• "Growing Faith: Prisons, Hip-Hop And Islam". HuffPost. 2013-03-07. Retrieved 2018-02-04.
• America's Academies for Jihad, by Ayaan Hirsi on the Wall Street Journal. 2018-02-04
• The Tayba Foundation - a religious Muslim organization committed to promoting a better quality of life for the incarcerated, on "Islam And Muslims In The U.S. Prison System"