Prisons Weigh Threat of Radical Islamist Gangs

Authorities investigating a radical Islamist prison gang linked to an alleged terrorist plot in Southern California said they believe that the group may have only a dozen hard-core followers within the state’s correctional system.

But the officials said they want to make sure that dozens of other prisoners and parolees are not aligned with Jamiyyat Ul Islam Is Saheeh, or JIS, given the FBI’s growing concern that disaffected inmates drawn to radical Islam could become a source of terrorist activity across the country.

A federal grand jury in Los Angeles last week indicted four men, including a state prisoner in Folsom who is believed to have founded JIS, on charges that they were conspiring over months to attack U.S. military facilities, synagogues and other sites in the area.

The inmate, Kevin Lamar James, 29, of Gardena is serving a 10-year sentence at California State Prison, Sacramento, for a 1996 robbery.

One of his alleged accomplices is Levar Haney Washington, 25, of Los Angeles, a former inmate at the prison. The other two, who have no criminal records, are Gregory Vernon Patterson, 21, of Gardena and Hammad Riaz Samana, 21, of Inglewood. Patterson and Samana met Washington within the last year at a local mosque. All three remain in custody on the federal terrorism charges.

Patterson’s parents, Rodney and Abbie Patterson, issued a statement last week in which they stood behind their son and said he “deserves a presumption of innocence.”

Samana’s attorney denied that his client was a terrorist. Washington’s attorney in a pending state robbery case declined to comment on the federal terrorism charges because he had not been retained to represent Washington in that case.

Authorities caution that they have only begun to assess what other possible terrorist threats may be posed by prison groups, including the hundreds of gangs and splinter groups they already monitor inside the nation’s largest correctional system.

But they view the emergence of JIS as a dangerous development that they admit they still cannot fully assess.

Richard Rimmer, a senior official at the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, declined to discuss specifics of the investigation. But he said the threat of violent Islamic radicals in the prisons is something “we take extremely seriously, because of the type of threat they represent.”

Rimmer, acting chief of the department’s law enforcement and investigations unit, would not speculate on the number of such radicals within the state’s prison system. But he said that “even a handful of religious extremists can cause a hell of a lot of problems. So we’re not underestimating the problem and the potential threat to the public.”

That said, Rimmer added, “the numbers really pale in comparison to other gang activity we deal with. Religious extremists, be they Muslim or Christian, are really a much smaller problem in terms of the safety and security of our institutions -- and the public -- than our major prison gangs and disruptive groups.”

Overall, California’s correctional system, with about 165,000 felons, is home to seven major prison-based gangs and 1,100 other groups viewed as “disruptive” enough to be of concern.

Members of these better-known gangs, Rimmer said, “are the individuals who have fomented the violence, the riots within the prisons and other problems over the years, and our control and management of those groups has been the principal focus of our gang suppression effort.

“But now we have this advent of religious extremists, and we are damn sure going to focus our attention on them as well.”

With more than 2 million Americans behind bars, prisons are seen by some as a hotbed of the disaffected -- ideal soldiers for a war against government.

Some terrorism experts worry that these angry young recruits will be motivated by a desire for “payback” against a system many believe is unfair and oppressive.

Other recruits may be Muslims whose religious beliefs can be exploited by corrupt imams and others with a radical agenda.

Over the last 30 years, Islam has become a powerful force in America’s correctional system, with estimates that 10% to 20% of the inmate population are Muslim.

Corrections officials around the country say that until the Los Angeles case, they had seen little or no evidence linking the practice of Islam with terrorist plots.

Moreover, authorities have acknowledged that they have no evidence of any overseas links to the alleged terrorist plot.

But federal agents see reasons for vigilance.

An Al Qaeda training manual found by police in Manchester, England, instructs operatives to set up “Islamic programs” if they are incarcerated and to try to recruit “candidates.” Such candidates, the manual said, include those “disenchanted with their country’s policies.”

In July 2003, New Jersey’s Office of Counter-Terrorism issued a lengthy report calling prisons an “increasingly fertile breeding ground for Islamic extremism” and prisoners a natural captive audience.

It quotes one former FBI official as saying that prisoners are one of three groups, along with fighters trained at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and those who have joined radical mosques, who most trouble the bureau.

“Gangs have long recruited in prisons for people to act as their supplicants once they got out,” said another FBI official, Michael Mason, who heads the agency’s Washington, D.C., field office. “What is new here is the focus on radicalizing people in prisons.”

Corrections officials said that tracking the new wave of disruptive groups that profess a religious belief was difficult. Because of constitutional protections of inmates’ right to practice religion, officials do not routinely monitor prayer meetings and other services in California prisons.

To do so, Rimmer said, would require a warrant based on a reasonable expectation that the religious gathering represented a threat to prison security.

Some scholars who study corrections say that changing conditions inside American prisons, such as dwindling privileges and cuts in job training and education programs, could contribute to the appeal of extremist groups.

In 1988, Congress began restricting college grants for inmates, despite overwhelming evidence that education helps maintain order in prison and cuts recidivism.

By 1994, all college aid for convicts had been halted.

Legislation also has eliminated food stamps, public housing, veterans’ benefits and other government help for large numbers of parolees, cuts that have had a disproportionately large effect on minority families.

And, some prison experts say, even the cuts in paid prison chaplain programs have had an effect by opening prisons to virtually any “religious” volunteer, regardless of credibility or background, who wants to meet with a prisoner.

“A warehoused population with little available work or educational opportunity and the promise of political, social and economic exclusion when they get out?” Jonathan Simon, a law professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall who studies prisons, said in an interview.

“Sounds like a good opportunity for Al Qaeda to me.”

But others question the notion that American prisons are teeming with would-be terrorists.

Ronald Huff, a criminology professor at UC Irvine who has worked in corrections, said although many prisoners may be anti-authority, “most inmates I’ve seen are pretty patriotic in their value system and will not necessarily be attracted to something inimical to the United States’ interest.”

One critic, professor Robert Dannin of New York University, put it more bluntly in the report by New Jersey’s Office of Counter-Terrorism:

“The claim that Muslim converts in prison could be a fifth column for Al Qaeda is ... dangerous baiting,” Dannin said. “Why would a sophisticated terrorist organization bother with inmates -- who are fingerprinted and whose data are in the U.S. criminal justice system?”

Some prison experts who focus on inmate rights also expressed concern that the hunt for would-be terrorists behind bars could subject mainstream Muslims to unwarranted harassment.

“Just like in the free community, the potential for abuse is there,” said Donald Specter, executive director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office. “In prison, people are thrown together and don’t really have a choice of who they live and associate with.

“I hope the FBI would be careful in not jumping to conclusions and take care to document connections and find concrete evidence that people are doing something wrong, rather than just guilt by association.”