Prisons are schools for crime. In any concentrated group of individuals of like persuasions, those with strong personalities overcome the weak, converting to them to a way of life or a way of thinking. The same of course is true in prisons where determined violent men and women influence the thinking and behavior of others.
Thus no one should be surprised to learn that violent jihadists, jihadists by guile, and all other that promote jihad against the infidel, will overcome the scruples of inmates, those that had few in the first place.
This is not a new problem. We have been talking about how to contain, curtail, and rehabilitate inmates for centuries. Now that prisoners are being recruited to join jihadists armies within Western prisons, the "problem" is now existential.
Here is Hugh Fitzerald on how to combat Da'wa, or the "call to Islam" within American prisons:
FBI Director Robert Mueller was recently quoted saying that American prisons were "fertile ground for extremists." And a 2006 study, "Out of the Shadows," said that "tight-knit communities of Muslims in prison are ripe for radicalization, and could easily become terrorist cells."
That study is three years old. Mueller's warning is not brand-new either. It is not only that already existing “tight-knit communities of Muslims in prison” are “ripe for radicalization, and could easily become terrorist cells.” It is also that there are numbers of people who, already alienated from society and already dangerous to it, find their solace not in a turn to Christianity, where the outcome is likely to be far different, but in an acceptance of Islam. For Muslim missionary activity goes on unmonitored and unchecked all because the Bureau of Prisons, and the FBI and the CIA and others whose duty it is to recognize and thwart dangers to this country, dangers to its legal and political institutions and physical dangers to its citizens, are afraid to recognize that what Islam inculcates in these prisoners gives them an ideological framework, a justification, for their hostility to the circumambient “Infidel” society. Islam offers them a view of the universe in which the central theme is Us and Them -- Muslims against all non-Muslims, with the duty of every Muslim to promote and protect only Islam, to be loyal only to fellow Muslims, to do whatever it takes to engage in the “Jihad” or “struggle” to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. And that “struggle” can, but need not where it is ineffective, include violence.
How big is the problem? According to a report in The Times, 30,000 to 40,000 prisoners, mostly black, convert to Islam every year. What has been done since the problem has been identified? What members of Congress, what people who are responsible for protecting us, have not only identified this problem, or part of it (as the authors of the 2006 study above did) but suggested ways for it to be dealt with? It is not enough to take at face value the claims of this or that Muslim chaplain who ostentatiously expresses his “horror” at, say, the just-publicized case of the four would-be Muslim terrorists, three of whom, apparently on their Spiritual Search, were easy prey for Muslim missionaries and became Muslims. That did not mean they had to do more than repeat the Profession of Faith, and one doubts that they knew a great deal about many aspects of Islam, including its ban on music and on most forms of artistic expression. And of course they would have had Islam presented to them as a vehicle for carrying their resentment against America or Amerikkka, rather than as a vehicle of Arab supremacism.