Dan Box, Chip Le Grand
    The Australian
    12:00AM June 20, 2015
 
Muslims are over-represented in Australian prisons, with increasing numbers of inmates under­going jailhouse conversions to gain the protection of Islamic groups behind bars.

In Victoria and NSW, 8 per cent and 9 per cent of the respective prison populations identify as Muslim, compared with 2.2 per cent and 3 per cent of the general populations. The percentage of Muslim inmates in Queensland is far lower, at 1.5 per cent.

Prison employees, who spoke confidentially to The Weekend Australian, say they are seeing ­increasing numbers of white and Aboriginal prisoners converting to Islam in jail.

Muslim groups have become increasingly influential in NSW prisons and — like other prison gangs — are often involved in the drug trade, extortion and gambling, these sources said.

“I think the conversion (to Islam) is not really a religious conversion. It’s to cover what you’re doing and to get a network behind you,” one prison worker said. “It’s to be part of something. You think that you’re important.”

Obtaining accurate figures for the number of conversions is impossible, although prison sources suggest a single NSW jail may see three or four a month.

Academics say previous public attention on the conversion of ­Aboriginal prisoners to Islam and the prospect this may be linked to radicalisation has been overblown.

Kuranda Seyit, a spokesman for the Islamic Council of Victoria, said survival in jail often required affiliation with a group, whether “white, Aboriginal, Vietnamese, Pacific Islander or Muslim”.

“A lot of the leaders of these groups put on the skull cap and grow a beard and create this sense that they are very important from their religious identity,” he said.

Identifying specific groups in the system is difficult. Authorities regularly move inmates between jails to prevent gangs becoming established, and gangs inside do not simply reflect the identities of those on the outside.

One of the few academics to study Islam in Australian jails, University of Western Sydney’s Michael Kennedy, said the fact Muslims were over-represented reflected recent immigration

“If you go back over the last 50 years, every new group of immigrants is over-represented in the prison population,” he said.

Each wave of immigrants had become involved in organised crime, often forming gangs ­defined by family and ethnic ties.

“They’re prepared to do anything to prevent them going back to where they came from,” Professor Kennedy said.

“They get caught and they end up in jail. Most recently, you are seeing ­arrivals from Muslim countries which are currently conflict zones, meaning their social dislocation and disadvantage is even more stark.”

Criminologists say there are about 10 dominant Middle Eastern crime families in Sydney, controlling tens of millions of dollars in drug revenue annually. In the past decade, members have been increasingly likely to co-operate with other families, bikies or East Asian crime gangs.