Spotlights on Razor Wire

By Crispin Sartwell

A recent Justice Department report suggests that radical religious movements - including various extreme brands of Islam - thrive in prisons, and that the American prison system is potentially a context of recruitment for terrorists.

Indeed, it seems that Jose Padilla - the "enemy combatant" whom the Justice Department has held without charge or counsel and recently asserted was involved in plans to blow up hotels and apartment buildings - converted to Islam in a Florida prison.

But the American prison system was also the training ground of Charles Graner, who seems to have been the most sadistic of the Abu Ghraib torturers. Before enlisting in the US Army, he was apparently a sadistic guard at a super-max prison in Pennsylvania.

It's hard not to see that Padilla and Graner as our yin and yang. They deserve one another: the terrorists deserve to be tortured and the torturers deserve to be terrorized. That is a pretty good picture of the world at this moment.

More than any society in the world, contemporary America is dedicated to incarceration. It is our solution to vice, evil, perhaps race and poverty. More than 2 million Americans are in prison, higher as a percentage of the population than almost any society in history aside from a few relatively brief aberrations such as the Hitler's Germany.

About 1 out of every 75 American men is in prison, and about 12% of all black men in their twenties.

And though in general nice law-abiding citizens rarely think about what happens to people after they are consigned, we had better think about what it means that we live in a culture of incarceration. That fact shapes us from top to bottom; it produces us.

We present ourselves as a beacon of freedom, a shining city on a hill, but as our prisoners and guards are aware, as Iraqis and Palestinians know, the shining is the glint of spotlights on razor wire.

Malcolm X converted to the Nation of Islam in prison, and prison ministry has always been an important element in the Nation's recruitment.

The Nation of Islam is a pretty extreme religion; it teaches, among other things, the superiority of black over white people. But the Nation of Islam has also saved and transformed countless hard, poor, and criminal lives, Malcolm's among them.

The Nation gave Malcolm self-control and personal dignity and the power to help other people to gain those qualities. That transformation is inseparable from the Nation's radical teachings.

Many other movements have used this model of prison conversion. The Nation of Gods and Earths ("5 Percenters"), for example, have fought and won a series of court cases to be allowed to continue their prison ministry.

The line between religious sects and prison gangs is often hard to draw. Nevertheless it has to be drawn, and the benefit of the doubt must be given to spiritual freedom even in the context of physical restriction.

You can try to completely repress the religious lives of inmates, or restrict it to certain approved ( i.e. Christian) sects. This is likely to be ineffective without absolutely draconian strategies of isolation. But it is also going to deny to many inmates the power to re-make themselves. And it would be an example of precisely the sort of repression that drives extreme spiritual and physical responses.

Meanwhile, we had better start thinking not only about what the Padillas we're making, but the Graners we are.

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book - "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives" includes a profile of Malcolm X.