It has been more than 18 months since troubling reports surfaced that terrorists convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had found a way to get around prison security and send 90 letters to Islamic extremists.
Last week, a government oversight investigation into 10 high-security federal prisons – including the so-called Supermax in Florence, where the original incident occurred – found inmate mail still is not adequately monitored.
The problem, according to the report by the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Justice, boils down to money.
The prisons house some of the most brutal and prolific killers in the world, yet they don’t have enough staff to read all the mail of their most dangerous charges. At seven of the 10 institutions, mail monitoring of the most dangerous prisoners had decreased during the last year due to staff shortages.
Furthermore, the prisons don’t have people on board who are fluent in the right languages, particularly Arabic and even Spanish, the most frequently spoken foreign language. Due to lack of language proficiency, even the translations that are done have been deemed “faulty.” And not all the translators are trained to be able to spot whether terrorists are using code or other ways of conveying hidden messages.
In the incident at the facility in Florence, the imprisoned terrorists exchanged at least 14 letters with jihadists in a Spanish terror cell. One of them was later accused of blowing up the National Justice Building in Madrid.
After the breach, U.S. prison authorities took steps to fix the problem, particularly in Florence. But prison managers cannot fully implement their plans because they don’t have enough money to hire people with the right skills and their prison populations keep rising.
Given the number of lives lost in the pursuit of terrorists as well as the enormous sums of money spent to put them behind bars, we cannot skimp on prison security. When a new Congress returns to Washington, members ought to thoroughly investigate this situation and find the money the prisons need to ensure these people cause no more harm.
