Peter King, was held last week with a debate over whether US prisons are an important or insignificant breeding ground for Muslim radicals.
The first of three controversial hearings began in March, drawing mass protests as well as support. The second round of hearings on the radicalization in US prisons last week drew a similar response.
King explained that the June 15 hearings, titled “The Threat of Muslim-American Radicalization in US Prisons,” would “be a deliberate and thoughtful examination of an issue that is too important for our security to ignore.”
During the opening of the hearings, law enforcement officials testified that Islamic radical-ization in the prison system was a real threat. Patrick Dunleavy, a retired official in the New York State Department of Correctional Services, said radical Muslims have been trying to convert US inmates to their cause for decades.
“Despite appearances, prison walls are porous,” Dunleavy said. “Individuals and groups that subscribe to radical Islamic ideology have made sustained efforts to target inmates for indoctrination.”
Kevin Smith, a former federal prosecutor in California, cited the case of Kevin James and Levar Washington, who pleaded guilty in 2007 to “conspiracy to levy war against the United States through terrorism.”
Michael Downing, an official in the Los Angeles Police Department, described the conversions as a “phenomena of low volume,” but one that holds “high consequence.” “We do have a problem,” he said. “Prisons are communities at risk.”
King, who represents part of Long Island and is chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, claims the prisons are a hotbed of radical conversion, but that he’s not targeting Muslims. “What I’m targeting is violent terrorists and extremists, and … the fact is that al-Qaeda itself has said it will recruit within the Muslim-American community. That’s the reality,” he told Fox News.
But not everyone present agreed. At the opening of the hearing, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said the threat of terrorism from US converts in prison was actually “small.”
Representative Laura Richardson, Democrat of California, suggested King’s hearing was “racist.” Richardson questioned why Muslim inmates were being singled out and targeted.
Other critics who protested the hearings accused King of playing on stereotypes of both Muslims and prisoners. The protesters, who included an imam who works as a chaplain in a county jail on Long Island, said he has seen no evidence of terrorist recruitment at the jail.
“If we found anyone in our community committing an act of terrorism, by the time the police got there the matter would be settled and there would be one less terrorist,” he said.
Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, four cases of American Muslims being radicalized in prison have been reported. But Bert Useem, a professor or sociology at Purdue University, said the number of Muslim Americans radicalized in prison is relatively low. “Prisons have not served as a major source of Jihad radicalization,” Useem said.
As for the third set of hearings on the radicalization of Muslim Americans, King said they will likely be held in late July and the focus will be on reports of Americans joining al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
