On Nov. 4, 2025, Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy pleaded guilty to stabbing a corrections officer with a weapon he fashioned from a jailhouse desk. A written note law enforcement found shortly after the attack stated plainly, “This is a terrorist attack for the Islamic State.” El Bahnasawy, with a documented history of untreated mental health issues, was already a decade into a previous conviction of 40 years for plotting attacks in New York City on behalf of the designated terrorist organization. According to prosecutors, El Bahnasawy has never wavered from his violent ideology. He's not alone among convicted terrorists in refusing to renounce his fervent, violent beliefs—but he is one of the few.
Movies and television shows often portray hardened extremists, committed to their ideology until their very last days of incarceration and first days back in society. But, in the real world, recidivism among those who are convicted of terror offenses in the United States isn’t just low—at less than 4 percent, it’s rare.
Despite the low rate of convicted terrorist recidivism, recent events suggest that this trend may be on the path to quietly inching higher in the coming years as more and more convicts are being released.
To name a few examples: In July, a 21-year-old German man killed a woman and injured another 29 people after he was released from a brief stint in detention for attempting to join the Islamic State. In France, a man who had been recently released early on a 17-year prison sentence for a terror-inspired stabbing of two Belgian police officers was killed in February during an attempted knife attack on gendarmeries at the Arc de Triomphe. And in March, 36-year-old Mohamed Jalloh killed an instructor with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) at Old Dominion University, a decade after he was convicted of attempting to provide material support to ISIS.
These cases suggest the problem isn’t simply recidivism rates, but rather a haphazard and nearly nonexistent reintegration system that conflates disengagement from violence with actual deradicalization. With dozens of convicted terrorists soon to be released in the coming years, the United States lacks any uniform standard for how, or whether, they’re tracked.
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‘This Case Kept Me Up At Night’
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