Back to the Future: Fears of Radical Islam Inside American Prisons.

A moral panic about homegrown terrorism has intersected with a reversal in judicial decisions about inmates' rights inside prison walls. US Supreme Court decisions of the Warren and Burger eras once granted a modicum of prisoners' civil rights (in particular religious liberty). A reversal began in the 1990s, granting greater discretion to prison administrators. This paper investigates the surveillance and regulation of Islam/Muslim inmates under these conditions: strengthened discretionary powers in the hands of prison administration (executive power); public perceptions of the risk of homegrown Islamic terrorism; and neoliberal trends in lawmaking rationalities identifying which enemies the government must confront in order to protect citizens. Focuses on shifts from judicial to executive governance and compares current racialized fears of the Muslim terrorist with historical racialized fears of Black Nationalism evident in executive responses to rights claims inmates raised in the 1960s and 1970s. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]