I'm not sure Charles Colson is actually arguing for an outright ban of all Islamic ministries in US prisons in this WSJ op-ed. Glenn Reynolds is right that that wouldn't "fly." Colson does appear to believe that simply "bringing the Gospel into the prisons and telling inmates about the love of Christ" is some kind of solution, which is extremely dubious.
But short of banning all ministries, they really need to look into the radical Islamist ones. Many such groups, like the Islamic Assembly of North America, are directly funded by the Saudi government with the specific goal of spreading Wahhabist radicalism, as the NYT has reported. The Saudi government also recruits and trains Americans as Wahabbist imams:
The training of Americans, especially African-Americans, as imams in Saudi Arabia has also had a clear ideological purpose, said Faheem Shuaibe, imam at a large, predominantly black mosque in Oakland, Calif. More than 200 African-American imams have been trained in Saudi Arabia, he said."There was a very deliberate recruitment process by the Saudis, trying to find black Muslims who had a real potential for Islamic learning and also for submission to their agenda," said Mr. Shuaibe, who has frequently traveled to Saudi Arabia. "They taught Islam with the intent to expand their influence. A principal target was to stop the indigenous Muslim leadership in America from tinkering with the religion."
It's worth recalling Steven Schwartz's article on Wahhabism from the Weekly Standard last October:
The West has multitudes of potential Muslim allies in the anti-terror war. They are the ordinary, sane inhabitants of every Muslim nation, who detest the fundamentalist violence from which they have suffered and which is symbolized, now and forever, by the mass murder in New York.There is another historical lesson to be drawn. Wahhabism—whose quintessence is war on America—seeks to impel Islam centuries back in time, to the faith’s beginnings, yet it is neither ancient nor traditional. Indeed, it achieved its culmination, the establishment of the Saudi kingdom, only in the 1930s, in parallel with fascism and Stalinism. Although it appears to be a rejection of modernity, Wahhabism can usefully be thought of as a variant of the nihilistic revolutionary ideologies that spilled oceans of blood in the twentieth century but finally collapsed.
Here's Glenn's proposal:
one way to reduce this threat would be to stop putting people in prison for short, revolving-door sentences. If people aren't going to get out of prison until they're 70, I don't care who recruits 'em. And if they're not in prison at all, they're not subject to prison recruiting.What has produced such a large and vulnerable population for Islamists to exploit is the locking up of lots of people for nonviolent drug crimes. Get rid of them, and keep the people guilty of real crimes like rape, robbery and murder in there for a long time, and you'll solve this problem. And a lot of others. And without violating the First Amendment.