Conversion to Islam in U.S. prisons refers to the contemporary high rate of conversion to Islam in American prisons, for which there are a number of factors. It is the fastest growing religion in U.S. prisons, where the population is 18 percent Muslim (compared to 1 percent for the general population); 80 percent of all prison religious conversions are to Islam.
Early history
Black Muslim organizations, such as The Nation of Islam and Moorish Science Temple of America, formally began prison outreach efforts in 1942. However evidence suggests that Muslims may have comprised a small fraction of the inmate population in the United States as early as the 1910s. New research brought to light an African immigrant inmate at San Quentin State Prison named Lucius Lehman, who was proclaiming himself to be a Muslim religious leader while calling for Black nationalism during his incarceration from 1910–1924. Although there is no documentation that Lehman himself converted to Islam or converted others in prison, it appears that he achieved some level of influence among the prison's Black population during his incarceration. Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad himself was incarcerated in the early 1940s when he was convicted of draft evasion. Elijah Muhammad's organization would later gain its most famous convert, Malcolm X, who took interest in the Black Muslim movement while also incarcerated in the 1950s. A small but steady stream of conversions occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s. In New York, evidence of Sunni Muslims worshiping openly in the state's correctional facilities appeared in the 1960s. These inmates reached out to a local New York Muslim community called Darul Islam for assistance, which eventually led to an active Muslim-based prison ministry and educational program forming in the state. Muslim prison outreach efforts during this era sought to instill values of honesty, hard work, individual responsibility, and mechanisms for dealing with rehabilitation as well as coping with drug and alcohol abuse.
Prisoner rights
The Hands-off Doctrine, the approach where federal courts refrained from interfering on inmate rights cases for many decades, was a practice that dated back to the early 20th century and was still practiced by 1960. Despite the growth of conversions to Islam within prisons, states such as California, New York and Texas still had not yet recognized or accommodated the religious activity of Muslim inmates by the start of the 1960s. As the number of incarcerated Muslims began to reach a critical mass, prisoners petitioned courts to advance their religious rights. The Hands-off Doctrine began to diminish during the 1960s as courts started to look into specific violations regarding prisoners. Cases involving Muslim prisoners began succeeding in gaining recognition for a variety of rights over the next several years, such as freedom from punishment due to religion, the right to hold religious services, the right to possess and wear religious medals, and the right to proselytize. New York's State Department of Correctional Services offered to hire Muslim chaplains as department employees by 1975, with the Texas Department of Corrections hiring its first Muslim chaplain two years later. Muslims later won the legal right to obtain religious (halal) diets in prison, with federal prisons attempting to accommodate halal diets beginning in 1983. Some argue that Islam's growth in prisons was made possible through these court cases. These legal victories not only solidified Islam as a legitimate religion among corrections staff and prisoners, but also placed Muslim groups at the center of the prisoners' rights movement for obtaining constitutional rights on behalf of the incarcerated.