‘In Bad Company’

Mark Hamm

Mark Hamm warily regarded the small, unmarked package that came with his university mail. Postmarked from an unknown city in Sweden, he thought back to his recent trip to that country where he interviewed former Neo Nazis.  For years, Hamm’s name appeared on an Indiana State University security list while the Unabomber sent explosive mail to his victims and after the Oklahoma City bombing. Indiana State University’s Public Safety officers routinely screened his mail, which was kept separate from university mail.

“I’d had threats,” said the bushy-haired man with the pin of the peace sign proclaiming “Back by Popular Demand” attached to his jacket’s lapel and a “Fight Racism” bumper sticker on his office door, which opens to letters from students and posters of Hamm’s heroes of Nelson Mandela, Bob Marley and Che Guevara on the walls.

“Mark goes to where the danger is, where the situation is,” said Jeff Ferrell, a criminology professor at the University of Kent in England and friend of Hamm’s for more than 20 years.

It’s part of Hamm’s philosophy on using “seat-of-the-pants” research and it’s one that can also place him at peril.

Militia members, skinheads, government officials, lawyers, lovers and wives of men Hamm has written about all have objected to what he has had to say. In studying men people move across towns to avoid, Hamm has found his voice and spoken about his findings.

This time, this package when investigated contained business cards. But Hamm knows he must remain wary.

Stuttering Start

“All terrorism begins with a grievance…” — Mark Hamm, In Bad Company

Hamm wasn’t studious when he attended Indiana University. He spent too much time protesting the Vietnam War and running a pirate radio station, both of which caused him to spend time in jail.

“Those were some pretty dramatic times,” he said.

Then he signed up for a class with Alfred Lindesmith, one of the nation’s leading criminologists, in order to study drug use. Hamm listened as jazz musicians and prizefighters, whom Lindesmith invited to class, described their crimes, their time in jail and their drug rehabilitation. In that class, Hamm found a path that would lead him to becoming an internationally known expert on terrorism.

After graduating from college in 1971, Hamm began a 13-year career working for prisons in Arizona.

“Prison was an extension of goals we were trying to achieve in the civil rights movement,” he said. “I was among the generation of civil rights workers to apply their ideals in prison.”

"Their terrorism represented their self-justified need toright those wrongs. -- Mark Hamm, "In Bad Company"

From a guard to a teacher to a warden to a central office administrator, Hamm worked in maximum security prisons, on death row and in juvenile detention centers to help rehabilitate prisoners, not just warehouse them. During that work, he learned a lesson that he would take with him years later.

As he worked to rehabilitate prisoners, he came to know thousands of them. He learned about prison gangs, how prisoners smuggled in drugs, how to survive in a prison.

“I learned about prisoners as people,” he said.

That lesson would stay with him and impact his future research.

“His research is really distinctive,” said John Hagedorn, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “He is looking at the margins from first-hand experience. A lot of people in the field don’t really know what it’s like, but Mark does.”

Speaking new life

Such an idea excited Wall.

“Mark was the first person to show me the value and importance of ethnographic field research – the idea that the researcher should actually leave the security and isolation of his or her university office in order to talk to and converse with the very people involved in the issue and under scrutiny.”

In that one class, Wall became enamored with criminology and its possibilities.

Mark Hamm lectures on rise of terrorists in prison.

“I know it sounds corny, but I was ecstatic,” he said. Wall called his father after class to share an epiphany. He told his father that he wanted to be an academic who conducted ethnographic research.

“The importance of this particular experience for me is not simply that Mark turned me on to ethnography, but that it was this experience that really provided me with a direction in my life that I had previously lacked – a very important thing for a small town kid from rural Greene County, Indiana,” said Wall, now an assistant professor at Eastern Kentucky University.

When Wall thinks about Hamm, a memory surfaces from outside the classroom. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Wall watched news coverage at Holmstedt Hall where the criminology department had set up a television in a conference room. Hamm sat in the chair behind Wall as they watched the second tower fall amid the chaos and confusion of that day. When a Terre Haute news crew arrived to interview Hamm, Wall started to leave.

“Seeing this, Mark put his hand on my shoulder, indicating for me to sit still and that I did not need to leave – and he simultaneously said, ‘You don’t have to leave. We are all in this together,’” Wall recalled. “Even at the time, I thought there was something especially prescient about Mark’s comments and his call for inclusive belonging as opposed to exclusion in a time of televised national trauma. His inclusive words to me broke down the boundaries between professor and student, expert and lay person, in a way that was as important to me then as it is now when I think back to that day.”

Hamm’s long-time friend Ferrell sees it as another aspect of Hamm’s life.

“Of all the things about him, I’m struck by his kindness to other people,” Ferrell said. “As brilliant as he is, he’s kind to other people.”

Although what Hamm teaches often focuses on a gritty, dark side of life, and his research explores men who violently intimidate others, Hamm thinks the students connect with what he has to say.

“The American criminal justice system is no friend to the poor and alienated, either in practice or in metaphor.” — Mark Hamm, In Bad Company

“You stand there lecturing, teaching, and you get a visceral feel that something’s going in, percolating there,” he said.

John Turner, an ISU graduate student studying criminology, has embarked on a research project with Hamm considering how life events led jihadists, white supremacists and lone wolf terrorists into terrorism.

“I’ve never met someone so passionate about what they do as Dr. Hamm,” he said. “When I had him as an undergrad – even though it was only one class – I knew if I pursued a graduate degree that I wanted to do research with him.”

Hamm has long involved students in his work. He is particularly proud of a group of his students who in 1987 – at the request of the American Civil Liberties Union – went to work defending Cubans who were accused of leading riots at the federal prisons in Atlanta and Louisiana. The Cubans rioted after finding out they were to be repatriated to Cuba. Criminology students prepared cases and defended the Cubans, who were housed at the Terre Haute federal prison, while language students served as interpreters.

“We got 100 men or more to walk. There was no evidence that they committed any crime,” he said “Havana didn’t want them. Washington didn’t want them. The one place they got some help was in Terre Haute with the criminology department.”

Listening to Hatred

The rise in the United States of the Neo Nazi or skinhead movement coincided with Hamm’s arrival at Indiana State and has impacted his career for decades.

“I saw them as 180 degrees from the hippie movement,” he said about the skinheads. “We revered Ghandi. They revered Hitler.”

At the time, no one had studied the groups. Hamm tried repeatedly to contact the shaven-headed, Doc Marten boot-wearing men, but met failure after failure. On the verge of giving up, he found new inspiration. As he sat listening to then-ISU President Richard Landini give his 1988 fall address, he heard the university’s eighth president state, “We must find a way, in this special place, to understand the turmoil that afflicts society beyond our gates.”

“To me, this was a battle cry, an inspiration for me,” Hamm said. “What that meant to me was keep trying.”

“Terrorism, like other criminal behavior, is learned through interaction with others; and that learning includes skill and idealogy…It also includes something else: fanatical dedication to a cause.” — Mark Hamm,In Bad Company

Newly inspired, he rented a post office box using an alias. He sent away for Neo Nazi literature under the fake name and then he mailed letters to the different groups that sent information stating he was writing a book and offering $25 for interviews.

“Lo and behold, the phone started ringing,” he said.

News of Hamm’s work began to spread through the movement and during a six-month period, he interviewed 35 skinhead leaders.

“When I got inside the groups, they were for all intents and purposes, gangs. There were violent. They were all to a person extremely racist. They were people by every measure I despised.”

The Neo Nazis celebrated their working class roots while hating the upper class. They celebrated the violence.

“They want the blood on their shirts,” Hamm said. “The violence was very bloody, very carnal. They wore blood as a badge of honor.”

Those interviews resulted in his first book, “American Skinheads: The Criminology and Control of Hate Crime.” That beginning of investigating hate further prepared Hamm for the American people’s collective whiplash in the coming decades and as a platform for Hamm’s voice to be heard by a national, then international, audience.

Explosive voices

"...the new revolutionary would be a man with no family or friends. He would lead a grim existence and harbor a bitter hatred for the government. Aided by one or two others, such a man could wreck profound havoc upon the enemy if he followed several crucial precepts." -- Mark Hamm, "In Bad Company"

“There’s a very fine line between hate crimes and domestic terrorism,” Hamm said. “Many hate crimes are minor acts of domestic terrorism.”

On April 19, 1995, the minor became major when a homemade bomb exploded the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring more than 680. For the next 10 years, Hamm investigated and wrote about the bombing and its perpetrator Timothy McVeigh.

“I thought I might as well. I was already geared up,” he said.

While McVeigh wasn’t a skinhead, he befriended those who were and held membership in the Arkansas Ku Klux Klan. Hamm later asserted that the relationship between McVeigh and the Aryans went beyond that.

In researching his book on the Oklahoma City bombing, Hamm set off on a “seat-of-the-pants” trip that took him from his office in Holmstedt Hall to the roads that McVeigh drove. He stayed in the same hotel rooms where McVeigh stayed. He walked back through McVeigh’s life to mine it for clues, to try to understand the man that made a deadly statement. Hamm’s first book about the tragedy, “Apocalypse in Oklahoma” sold out, but his follow up book, “In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground,” set off a backlash. Hamm described his first book about the bombing as “uncritical.”

“I adopted the government’s view that McVeigh was a lone wolf,” he said.

But in working on “In Bad Company,” about the Aryan Republican Army that robbed banks throughout the Midwest to help fund Neo Nazi activities, an Aryan leader forced Hamm to rethink his position. After reading a draft of the book, the leader said, “You missed our connection to McVeigh.” Hamm set out, through research, to establish that connection and to upend the government’s story of one man alone fueled by hate.

“Because terrorism is a form of criminality – arguably, it is the most serious form of criminality within any society – and the overwhelming majority of people involved with the antigovernment movement lacked the necessary life experiences – or the willingness – to engage in criminal behavior.” — Mark Hamm, In Bad Company

Within the pages of “In Bad Company,” Hamm argues that McVeigh was incapable of  creating the bomb that destroyed hundreds of lives and that the Aryan Republican Army helped McVeigh by funding him through bank robberies, aiding him in building the bomb and assisting in his escape from Oklahoma City. For that theory, Hamm received some praise, some criticism and the conspiracy theorist label.

“That’s really disingenuous. Nearly all terrorism is a conspiracy,” he said. “Any time a scholar attempts to explain something, he creates a theory. It’s disingenuous and incorrect to call that person a conspiracy theorist. You need a theory to explain terrorism. That’s what I did.”

Crumbling voices

That largest act of domestic terrorism gave way before the rolling shock wave of Sept. 11, 2001.

“McVeigh just vanishes in the wake of 9/11,” Hamm said. “He vanished from all walks of government, academe, media. We were just overwhelmed by 9/11.”

Hamm spent two years after 9/11 trying to figure out how he could study this new form of terrorism and the men who brought it.

“I got very frustrated. I thought, ‘What can I do? I don’t know Arabic. I’m not a scholar of Islamic history,’” he said.

Then the reports of inmates converting to Islam and incidents from their radicalization surfaced. Hamm, with his knowledge and understanding of prisons, found his topic. He applied for research funding from the National Institute of Justice to conduct research on prison radicalization, but was denied. In 2004, Islamic terrorists, including two radicalized while in prison, placed bombs on commuter trains in Madrid, Spain, and killed 191 people.

“Then my phone rang,” Hamm said.

The National Institute of Justice wanted him to start his proposed research, and from 2005 to 2011, Hamm once again walked through prisons. His newest book, “The Spectacular Few: Prisoner Radicalization and Terrorism in the Post-9/11 Era” will be released in 2013.

His phone has continued to ring because of his research. Hamm has been asked to testify before Congress as well as to speak at Scotland Yard, the Max Placnk Institute in Germany, the Israeli Prison Service and the Ministry of Justice in The Hague. Prominent newspaper and news stations also call upon Hamm to speak about terrorism.

Mark Hamm

While it remains difficult to discover which prisoners will become a threat, Hamm did find one common thread running through the prisons.

“The spectacular few do not come out of superbly managed prisons,” he said.

Of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in American prisons, an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 have converted to Islam, so radicalization is “by no means widespread,” Hamm said. “Of those, there’s just an infinitesimal number that you need to be worried about.”

Those spectacular few.