Islamist radicals in prison: How many?

Mr. DeVeaux was a Muslim leader during the 25 years he spent in New York State prisons for a murder conviction. He says there are stark differences between American-born Muslims in prison and immigrant Muslim prisoners, who make up a very small fraction of the population.

"I encourage local imams to seize the agenda from the immigrant Muslims and stop allowing them to define for Westerners what Islam is and what the Muslim agenda is," he says.

But he and others with experience behind bars see potential for extremists of all kinds to indoctrinate and recruit young, alienated prisoners. The practice is more prevalent in European prisons, where the Muslim population is primarily made up of first- and second- generation immigrants with close ties to South Asia. Richard Reid, the attempted shoe bomber who was arrested in 2001, converted and became radicalized, according to prosecutors, while behind bars in Britain.

There has been only one publicly documented incident in the United States where officials say home-grown prison Islamists attempted to directly foment violence on the outside: In September 2005, police in California disrupted what they say was a plot by Kevin Lamar James, a self-styled leader of an Islamist inmate group, to blow up government facilities and Jewish synagogues in the Los Angeles area.

In 2004, a study by the inspector general of federal prisons found there was no coherent system for screening out extremist chaplains, and more than half of all religious services were not monitored. The Federal Bureau of Prisons responded by setting up a vetting process for its chaplains and religious volunteers. But 93 percent of inmates are in state and local prisons, which have a shortage of qualified Muslim chaplains as well as a lack of trained correctional officers to identify extremist ideology.

A report by George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute and Dr. Saathoff's Critical Incident Analysis Group, which was released Tuesday, says it's essential for local, state, and federal correctional officials to work closely with one another as well as the FBI. Then, they say, extremists within the prison system, and those on the outside who want to exploit it, can be identified and tracked. But they acknowledge it will be a challenge, particularly since most American prisons are overcrowded, and many are understaffed.

"The really critical thing here is information," says Jeffrey Raynor of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, who co-wrote the report. "Inmates often move between these systems, and we need to find innovative ways to integrate information so we can understand how to most efficiently short-circuit [the potential for terrorist recruitment] with our limited resources."

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