The danger of Islamic radicalization inside U.S. prisons “remains real and present,” alleges Republican U.S. Rep. Peter King of New York in his second congressional hearing on the threat of Muslims within America radicalizing.
It appears to me that Rep. King has never been inside a county jail or prison to meet incarcerated Muslims. If he had been, I suspect that Rep. King would not have made such an outlandish statement.
As a Muslim chaplain, I tend to prisoners of all faiths, not just Islam, and the common theme is that such people are seeking a new beginning through God.
Clearly lost upon Rep. King is the story of Malcolm X, a fellow New Yorker, who through Islam gave up his criminal ways to become one of this nation’s most honored civil rights activists.
Prisoners who convert to Islam in jail do so to find a new path, one that is far from the world of hate and violence that is often the cause of their incarceration.
To suggest that Muslim chaplains are radicalizing prisoners is to betray one’s own ignorance of the institutions of corrections in the United States. Books are screened for content, and chaplains interviewed and monitored.
But if Rep. King wishes to address incarceration, then let’s do that honestly. It is disgraceful that we, as Americans, place more emphasis on incarceration than on education.
In the past 20 years, state spending on prisons has grown at six times the rate of spending on higher education. And one in 31 Americans is under some form of corrections control.
Federal research shows states spend more than $50 billion annually on government-run correction programs. With more than 2 million people incarcerated in jails and prisons in the United States today, it would be more helpful for Rep. King, the House Homeland Security Committee chairman, to focus on issues of judicial and prison reform than on imaginary threats that are in reality thinly veiled attacks against Islam.
You do your job, Rep. King, and I’ll keep doing mine.
Hasan Hakeem is a Muslim chaplain for Kenosha County Jail and president of the Zion, Ill., chapter of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community
Civil death (Latin: civiliter mortuus)[1] is a term that refers to the loss of all or almost all civil rights by a person due to a conviction for a felony or due to an act by the government of a country that results in the loss of civil rights. It is usually inflicted on persons convicted of crimes against the state or adults determined by a court to be legally incompetent because of mental disability.[2]
In medieval Europe, felons lost all civil rights upon their conviction. This civil death often led to actual death, since anyone could kill and injure an ex-felon with impunity.[3] In the old German Empire, a person declared civilly dead was called "vogelfrei" ("free as a bird") and could even be killed since they were completely outside the law.[4]
Historically outlawry, that is, declaring a person as an outlaw, was a common form of civil death.[4]
A recent study by the Pew Center on the States, a nonprofit public policy research organization, found that 43.3 percent of people released from the nation’s prisons in 2004 were reincarcerated within three years. But many state prison inmates are released after serving their sentence without any requirement that they check in with authorities to make sure they’re not getting into trouble again. Theoretically, at least, inmates who leave prison under supervision ought to have a much lower recidivism rate than those who do not.
Imagine a corporate executive who’s been convicted of embezzlement. He serves his sentence and some years later, having paid his debt to society, leaves prison a free man. Now he’s an ex-convict, in fact, an ex-felon. Should we allow him to vote? Or has he forfeited his right to participate in American democracy?
Depending on where he lives, he may never vote again. Thirteen states bar ex-felons—permanently—from voting. Thirty-two states disenfranchise them while on parole, twenty-nine while on probation.
Few of us realize that ex-felons so commonly lose their right to vote. Nor are we aware that any felony can trigger what some have called “civil death.” If, for example, a first-time offender pleads guilty to a single drug sale and is placed on probation, he or she can be permanently barred from voting. As Andrew Shapiro, an attorney, notes, “ An eighteen-year-old first-time offender who trades a guilty plea for a non-prison sentence may unwittingly sacrifice forever his right to vote.”
The people most affected by these laws, as you might suspect, are not corporate executives. They are disproportionately black men. Thirteen percent of African-American men—1.4 million people—are permanently disenfranchised because they are in prison, on parole or probation, or are ex-felons.
The impact of such widespread disenfranchisement on our elections is staggering. Florida, for example, denies the vote to ex-felons who have fully served their sentence. According to New York-based Human Rights Watch, Florida law prevented more than four hundred thousand ex-felons from voting in the November election. Among African-Americans, the impact was dramatic. Approximately one-third of Florida’s black men—some two hundred thousand residents—were legally prohibited from casting a vote. Human Rights Watch concludes: “Assuming the voting pattern of black ex-felons would have been similar to the vote by black residents in Florida generally, the inability of these ex-offenders to vote had a significant impact on the number voting for Vice President Gore.”
In other words, absent these disenfranchisement laws, Gore would now be president.
This nation began with a stingy view of who was virtuous enough to cast a vote in elections. In fact, the framers limited this right to free white men who owned property. But ever since, suffrage has been extended to those who were initially excluded: people without property, women, African-Americans, and people who are not literate.
The one group still excluded is convicted felons. In part, this is a legacy of the South’s successful post-Reconstruction effort to prevent freed slaves from voting. Between l890 and 1910, southern states crafted their criminal disenfranchisement laws, along with other voting qualifications, with the goal of preventing African-Americans from voting. In 1901, for example, Alabama lawmakers inserted a provision in the state constitution that disenfranchised any person guilty of the felonious crime of “moral turpitude.” (In the South, that could mean just staring at a white woman.) Nor did the legislators even bother to hide their goal, which they openly declared was to establish and preserve white supremacy.
We are the heirs of that racist legacy. In most democratic countries, ex-felons are expected to re-enter society as citizens newly endowed with the rights and responsibilities they lost as legal outcasts. “These people have paid their debt to society,” says Jamie Fellner, associate counsel at Human Rights Watch. “No other country in the world takes away the right to vote for life.”
But in America, our legacy of slavery and Reconstruction still affects so many aspects of our democratic process—from the electoral college to poorly working voting machines in black districts. The bright side of Election 2000, however, is that it has ignited a spirited reconsideration of many of the arcane practices that shape our electoral process. So far, though, the issue of how many people are disenfranchised because of their criminal pasts has not been highly publicized.
I believe that an individual who is imprisoned for a felony should give up many civil rights, including that of suffrage. But afterward? If the point of imprisonment is rehabilitation, how can we conclude that people should suffer civil death after they have been released from prison? When a person has done time, he or she should be able to vote again, not after finishing parole, but upon leaving the prison grounds.
Because the disenfranchisement of ex-felons disproportionately affects African-American men, many of whom are in prison for drug felonies, many blacks are rightfully angry that disenfranchisement laws rob them of their participation in the voting process. “Fifty years after the beginnings of the civil rights movement, it is tragic that every day more black citizens lose their voting rights,” says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Washington D.C.-based Sentencing Project. “This is not just a criminal justice issue, but one of basic democracy.”
Joe Loya, a disenfranchised ex-felon, expresses this sentiment even more eloquently: “Without a vote, a voice, I am a ghost inhabiting a citizen’s space. I want to walk calmly into a polling place with other citizens, to carry my placid ballot into the booth, check off my choices, then drop my conscience in the common box.”
Listen to his words. They just may be the battle cry for the next struggle for suffrage.
Ruth Rosen, who teaches history at the University of California, Davis, and is an editorial writer at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Our challenge as Americans is what do we do about the thousands of men and women incarcerated in prisons? When they are relased how do we reintegrate them into society? Listen to what this inmate is saying to the listener. It is a cry for help. How do we help him to be a productive and better citizen in contemporary society, or should we just keep him locked up in an enviroment he has come to understand and survive in since he was a teenager?
His admission is a reality for men and women throughout our nation, who have no hope for a sustainable lifestyle in society, especially if they are on probation or parole conditions. They are subject to a brief freedom if they fail to adhere to the rules and regulations on "paper."
Michigan Rep. Clarke hits it right on the head. The problem is not Islam in prisons. It's the judicial system and the prison industrial complex that continues to suck the life out of our communities. Why not focus on the hatred that's created by inequality and injustice in the judicial system. What is needed is real justice -- Aboslute Justice For All Americans, regardless of creed, color, culture or race.
Rep. Hansen Clarke (D-MI) used his question period to deliver an impassioned address about the broader problem of prison reform, at times holding back tears as he discussed how the issue impacted his own life.
"We talk about political correctness, you know what pisses me off? I'm a damned member of Congress here and my friends have rotted in prison and those that have gotten out, they've never been the same again," he said. "Some of you who are Tea Party members, this is the waste we got to stop. We're spending too much money incarcerating young men, young black men, whose lives can be saved. It's not about Islam, it's abut the sentencing policy, it's about this prison system. We got to change that."
He added that based on his own discussions with prisoners who converted to Islam, inmates did so largely to gain protection from dangerous gangs and to make a clean break from their criminal past, not to engage in any kind of radical behavior.
Americans change religious affiliation early and often. In total, about half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lives. Most people who change their religion leave their childhood faith before age 24, and many of those who change religion do so more than once. These are among the key findings of a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life.
The Zion Project has impact on a two-state (Illinois and Wisconsin) three county area, Lake, Kenosha and Racine County. The reasons people give for changing their religion - or leaving religion altogether - differ widely depending on the origin and destination of the convert.
The group that has grown the most in recent years due to religious change is the unaffiliated population we have identified through our jail ministry efforts. Two-thirds of Christian converts to Ahmadiyyat, mostly Baptist denomination, say they left their childhood faith because they stopped believing in its teachings. Our research (interviews with 20 inmates) has additionally found that many people who left a religion to become unaffiliated say they did so in part because they think of religious people as hypocritical or judgmental, because religious organizations focus too much on rules.
The influence of Islam in jails, prisons.
Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the prison system. About 30,000 to 40,000 conversions among federal prisoners take place each year, according to a study for the Justice Department by Mark S. Hamm, a criminologist at Indiana State University. About 6 percent of the nation’s 173,000 federal prisoners are Muslim. Mr. Hamm’s study, published in December 2007, says that most inmates convert in prison for one of five main reasons: because they are in personal crisis, seek a spiritual dimension, are looking for a group to protect them, want to manipulate the system or are influenced by the outside world.
It is a fact, a disproportionate number of African-Americans are in prison. According to Human Rights Watch, 9% of all black adults are in corrections or on parole or probation. For black men between the ages of 20 and 29, the rate jumps to 33%. This translates to blacks comprising 49% of the prison population. Given a total incarcerated population of 2 million, this suggests up to one million African-American prison inmates (source).
It is estimated that as many as 30% of African-American inmates are Muslims and have converted to Islam in prison (source). That makes about 300,000 Muslim inmates. Not only is this a substantial number in and of itself but it comprises about 5% of all Muslims in America and 12% of African-American Muslims.
Ignore African-American Muslims and African-American Muslims in corrections and you are ignoring a major part of the experience of Islam in America.
Zion Project Jail Ministry
In Zion, our casework provides an intimate look at a variety of behavioral, attitudinal, emotional, and lifestyle variables. The acceptance of Islam/Ahmadiyyat can result in profound, life transforming changes in mid-level functions such as goals, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors, and in the more self-defining personality functions such as identity and life meaning.
The Zion Project strategies encourages inmates to maintain their religious conversions included developing close bonds with the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community through mentor contact. Several Jama’at members with social service experience have become volunteer Chaplains. They encourage inmates to avoiding people who are negative influences by using incarceration time in educational classes, daily prayer and meditation.
It has been our experience in working with those incarcerated that the overwhelming majority of inmates who convert to Islam/Ahmadiyya, the experience increases self-discipline and helps them interact in a positive way with other inmates and staff, thereby making a meaningful contribution to their rehabilitation.
"After they are here for a while, some inmates come to understand the need for a higher power," said Chaplain Alpha Bah. “Some start studying and attending the Friday serve and eventually they sign Bai’at. You can see the difference almost immediately. You see the difference in their comportment, in their tolerance of others.”
Ignore African-American Muslims and African-American Muslims in corrections and you are ignoring a major part of the experience of Islam in America.
