Every once in a while, just when you think you’ve seen all there
is to see of the liberals’ fecklessness, they surprise you again.
This time it’s the idea for replacing Guantanamo with a program
to “rehabilitate jihadists.”
The idea has surfaced as President Barack Obama’s announced plans
to close down the prison at Guantanamo Bay by next January. This
will “restore our respect in the world” and “prove that we live
by our ideals of…” what? Of not incarcerating people who try to
kill us? Well, never mind, there’s supposed to be lots of torture
going on down there. So let’s do something different.
Exactly what? Well, there are still 240 hard-core jihadists down
there. Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want them moved to Alcatraz and most
people feel the same. So what are we going to do with them?
The answer has come, “We’ll rehabilitate them.” The Saudis have a
program they claim has a 90 percent success rate in turning
jihadists into good citizens. It was described
in the New York Times Magazine last November. “There are
right jihads and there are wrong jihads,” the instructor — a
pudgy, mild-mannered imam, was reported telling his class of a
dozen or so sulking young men. These are the young warriors who
went off to Iraq or Afghanistan, then became disillusioned —
often because they were asked to become suicide bombers. They
have returned home, often by way of foreign prisons. Some were
even veterans of Guantanamo.
“Some of our young people don’t listen to the right scholars,”
the imam confided to Times contributor Katherine Zoepf.
“First they start to think that they have the right to go to
jihad at any time. After that, they start to think that we have
the right to kill any non-Muslim. Then they start to say that our
leaders are kuffar, infidels. After that they start to
say that our scholars, too, are kuffar. Before long,
they’ve declared war against the whole world” — including, one
might presume, their pudgy, mild-mannered instructors.
So instead of imprisoning them, the Saudis present them with a
bundle of gifts, including a digital watch, and put them through
two short months of instruction. Then the reformed former
jihadists are presented with a car (often a Toyota) and helped by
the Interior Ministry in finding an apartment. As much as
possible, they also try to find them a wife. “Getting married
stabilizes a man’s personality,” said the program administrator,
in an observation that has been noted since the days of the
Bible. If there is any moral hazard here — people joining the
program just for the benefits — no one has yet noticed.
Not every rehabilitation has been a success. In January, Abu
Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, formerly prisoner #372 at Gitmo, was
identified in a jihad video as a senior official of al-Qaeda in
Yemen, a group involved in attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Yemen
and Syria. Standing beside him was Abu al-Hareth Muhammad
al-Oufi, formerly prisoner #333. Both graduated from the Saudi
program in 2007. When challenged, Saudi officials confessed that
nine more graduates had also been arrested for subsequent
terrorist activities. “When they were released from the program
they were O.K., but in one way or another they were recruited
again,” explained Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, a spokesman for the
Saudi Interior Ministry.
Still, the Saudi record is better than Yemen, where — as the
Weekly Standard
reported last week — the government of President Ali
Abdullah Saleh actually seems to be funneling its rehab inmates
back into the international jihad movement.
In pursuing the illusion that terrorists can be rehabilitated,
President Obama and the Saudis are following a well trodden,
centuries-old path of idealistic optimism. When Alexis de
Tocqueville came to America in 1831, he was investigating a new
system of prison reform for the French government. The word
“penitentiary” is a 19th-century invention in which prisoners
were put in solitary confinement so they could do penance for
their crimes. (Many went insane instead.) The Blythedale
Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gentle satire of 19th-century
liberalism, features a character who spends his entire life
trying to found a prison that will cure criminality.
The 1960s were a huge era of prison reform. Driven by the latest
sociological fashion of “deviance theory,” criminologists became
convinced that jail inmates were only innocent “stumblers and
bumblers” and that the “real criminals” were too smart to be
apprehended. Prisons only turned the poor deviant bumblers into
hardened criminals. The resulting “deprisonization” movement
quickly triggered the greatest crime wave in American history,
producing an additional 500,000 homicides from 1965 to 1995, when
law enforcement finally began to assert itself again.
The public’s dissatisfaction with prison reform reached a
crescendo during the 1988 Presidential campaign when it became
known that Willie Horton, a Massachusetts inmate convicted of
killing a gas station attendant, had kidnapped and raped a
Maryland woman while on a weekend furlough for prisoners
serving life sentences without parole. The Lawrence
Eagle Tribune had dug out the story, winning a Pulitzer
Price in the process. When the Massachusetts legislature had
tried to repeal the program, Governor Mike Dukakis vetoed it on
the grounds that the furloughs were a legitimate “rehabilitation”
effort. The revelation sunk Dukakis’s presidential campaign.
The initial deflation of rehabilitation theory had actually comes
nearer the outset, when Robert Martinson, a noted political
scientist, was commissioned by New York State to find out the
best regimen for reforming state prisoners. Martinson did a
complete survey of all the studies ever written in English and
all the experiments conducted anywhere in the world after 1945.
His findings so shocked New York State officials that they
refused to publish them. They even denied Martinson access to his
own data, until he finally freed them with a court case.
Eventually published in the Public Interest in 1974, the
article was entitled “Nothing Works.” “[I]t is possible to give a
rather bald summary of our findings,” Martinson concluded. “With
few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have
been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on
recidivism.” Group therapy, occupational therapy, probation,
parole, stamping out license plates — all produced the same
result. No matter what was tried, a predictable 65 percent of
released prisoners return to crime after they were released. The
only strategy that seemed to make any difference was
psychotherapy. That increased the rate of recidivism.
Today the issue is pretty much settled. Few people — even the
most ardent civil libertarians — make much of an argument that
criminals can be reformed. The only thing that seems to work is
passing the age of 35. If young criminals reach this milestone —
and especially if they settle and marry — they may lead fairly
normal lives.
But all this is predicated on a society where young men have a
chance to lead normal lives. As Charles Murray has written so
famously, most men in American society can be assured that if
they “get a high school education, get married and get a job,”
they can lead a reasonably stable and productive life. Criminals,
on the other hand, are young men who aren’t satisfied with these
options but go for the “big score” through burglary, robbery or
other illegal activities such as dealing drugs. (Murder is
usually incidental to any of these — only a handful aspire to be
professional killers.) Aging out of crime is the only successful
rehabilitation program ever devised.
So what about Islam? Nearly every Moslem country practices
polygamy, which produces a perpetual shortage of marriageable
women. Young men are rarely ever in the presence of young women
in social situations. Nearly all marriages are arranged, often to
cousins. Differences in wealth aggravate this inequality, since
suitors are expected to pay a bride price, the hallmark of
polygamous societies. This is why women are veiled and hoarded by
their families — because they are valuable commodities.
As a result, every Islamic society has a large surplus of young
males whose frustration and anger must be redirected. Jihad is
the ideal solution, preferably exported. Every Moslem regime has
an uneasy relationship with its young Muslim fanatics, who must
be carefully pointed toward the West lest they turn on the regime
itself. Saudi Arabia, with its great inequalities of wealth and
the highest rate of polygamy, is the master at this strategy,
perpetually exporting young men as Wahhabi missionaries or
jihadists. “The majority [of jihadists] are always Saudis,” one
disgruntled veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines
told the Times’ Zoepf. It is no accident that 15 of the
19 hijackers on September 11 were from Saudi Arabia.
So now we’re going to send Guantanamo prisoners to be
rehabilitated in Saudi Arabia? What really needs reforming is
Saudi society.
Nonetheless, American liberals are optimistic. When the Saudis
claimed that only 10 percent of their rehabilitated jihadists
have returned to the battle, one liberal commentator gushed,
“Compared to our rate of 65 percent, that sounds pretty good!”
Maybe Dukakis did win after all.
