How is Prison related to Radicalization to Violent Extremism: New Evidence from a US Sample

• In Event: Improving our Understanding on how Persons are Radicalized to Terrorist Violence

Abstract

There has long been disagreement among terrorism researchers about the impact of imprisonment on radicalization and terrorist violence. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of imprisonment in the United States on engaging in acts of political violence. Using a newly available dataset of 1500 individuals who have radicalized to political extremism in the United States over the past four decades, the analysis shows that the use of violence can be in part predicted by an individual’s prior prison history and whether he/she was radicalized in prison. The results using a variety of matching schemes were consistent, providing similar conclusions based on the post matching logistic estimation strategy. Furthermore, the results held up to a variety of robustness checks.

Authors

• Bo Jiang, University of Maryland

• Lauren Porter, University of Maryland

• Gary LaFree, University of Maryland