For what it's worth, all four men who were arrested last night for attempting to blow up two New York synagogues were Muslims. Three were U.S.-born and one was from Haiti. Three were reportedly jail-house converts to Islam.
The Commission on Civil Rights did a report on prisoners' religious liberties a few months ago, which was duly sent to the President and the Congress as we are required to do. It was entitled, "Enforcing Religious Freedom in Prison." One of my regrets about the report is that it didn't present original research on the issue of prison radicalization. But it was careful to point out that this was an area of concern.
Some have expressed concern that statutes like RFRA and RLUIPA, which require prison officials to accommodate prisoners' religious practices unless they have a compelling reason not to, make terrorist recruitment easier. Former FBI Director Robert C. Mueller, for example, told the Senate Committee on Intelligence that "prisons continue to be fertile ground for extremists who exploit both a prisoner's conversion to Islam while in prison, as well as their socioeconomic status and placement in the community upon their release." Others have argued that these concerns are exaggerated or that those who express them overlook countervailing positive factors. See, e.g., Jennifer Warren & Greg Krikorian, "Terror Probe Targets Prison in Folsom," Los Angeles Times (August 17, 2005)(quoting a retired Bureau of Prisons religious services administrator who said that Islam is generally a positive force in prisoner rehabilitation). With the evidence our staff amassed, however, we couldn't begin to draw conclusions on this issue (other than to point it out). I wish we had focused on it more when the Commission was in the evidence-gathering phase of the investigation, but we didn't . (The design of the study was in place before I came to the Commission.)
What's remarkable is that even the relatively non-controversial recommendation in the report raised the hackles of the Commissioners appointed by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. The Commission's majority thought that prison authorities should "take national security considerations into account--carefully, even-handedly and without relying on ethnic or religious stereotypes--in reviewing requests for religious accommodation." But the Pelosi and Reid appointees argued in a Statement of dissent that the majority was guilty of "[s]ubverting [p]risoners' [r]eligious [f]reedom [r]ights with [g]eneralized and [n]on-specific [c]laims of [n]ational [s]ecurity." They evidently believe that prison officials should not take these matters into consideration.
Perhaps it was just politics, and if we had not adopted this statement, the Pelosi and Reid appointees would have rained criticism on the Commission for ignoring the issue. After all, there's plenty of evidence out there that this is a potential problem. See generally, Craig S. Smith, "Europe Fears Islamic Converts May Give Cover for Extremism," New York Times (July 19, 2004); Michael Elliott, "The Shoe Bomber's World," Time (February 16, 2002); Theodore Dalrymple, "I See Richard Reids in Jail Every Day," The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.)(December 30, 2001). And criticism of the Commission's work is not always ... well ... careful and even-handed.
In any event, I hope the Commission or some other body will take a further look at this in the near future.
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