Islam in Prison

The religion of Islam has increased rapidly in the United States and its prisons over the past 40 years. There are currently an estimated 5 to 7 million Muslims in the United States, with the following ethnic distribution: 29% are African American, 29% are South Asian, and 20% are Arab. There are smaller percentages among African, European, and other Asian groups. When Malcolm X converted to Sunni Islam in 1964, there were an estimated 3,000 African American Sunni Muslims. By 2003, that number had grown to between 1 and 2 million. In federal and state correctional facilities, a sizable number of inmates have converted to Islam. For example, according to Imam Luqman Abdur Shahid, the former director of Ministerial Services of New York City Department of Corrections, in [Page 487]1999 Islam replaced Catholicism as the religion of preference among the 17,000 daily inmates on Rikers Island. In New York state prisons, about 20% of the prison population are Muslims. Similar rates are found in the prison populations of the upper Midwest and the west coast in urban areas such as Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, the San Francisco Bay area, and Los Angeles. Only in the southern Bible Belt are the rates of Muslim conversion lower, about 10%.

The growth of Islam in the prison population of the United States was made possible by a series of court cases that eventually gave constitutional protection to Muslims and recognition of Islam as a legitimate religion. In the earliest cases, Bratcher v. McGinnis and Cooper v. Pate, the Nation of Islam paved the way for both orthodox Sunni Muslims and other Islamic sects such as Shiites and heterodox groups such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Gods and Earths or Five Percenters to be allowed to practice their faith while incarcerated. Other court cases led to Islamic inmates being allowed no-pork diets, to grow beards, to wear skull caps or kufis, and to pray at prescribed times five times a day as well as to own prayer rugs.