Islamist extremism is a growing issue for Britain’s – and for that matter the world’s – prisons. To recognise that reality is a vital first step towards dealing with it. It is also, in spite of some continuing pockets of denial and some lack of confidence in confronting it, the (relatively) easy bit. It soon leads on to a much harder challenge. How do the prison authorities devise a strategy for countering Islamist extremism that is appropriate, proportionate and effective without being counter-productive? Britain has a long and often ignoble history of trying to answer such problems in colonial contexts, above all in Ireland. Not all of its answers have proved to be successful, to put it mildly.
Partly this is because the issue of Islamist extremism is not as straightforward as may appear at first sight. For one thing, Islamist radicals have very different aims from Irish republicans. The IRA is not interested in recruiting criminals but in creating support. Islamists, by contrast, are very much in the business of proselytising and converting the vulnerable. Nor is there much reliable evidence of radicalisation, in part because it can be hard to define, and in part because of security issues. Ian Acheson’s redacted report on the subject, on the basis of which the justice secretary Elizabeth Truss announced new policies for England and Wales today, contains few figures to justify one course of action rather than another. Maybe the figures are alarming; maybe they are not. Their absence makes it hard to evaluate the policies that supposedly follow from them.
What we can know is that the authorities want to keep ahead of the game. There are some 130 Islamist terrorists behind bars in Britain, many with long years still to serve on sentences for very dangerous crimes. But Islamist extremism is not confined to Islamist terrorist prisoners. It can develop among some of those who are in prison for “ordinary” crimes. About 12,500 of the upwards of 90,000 prisoners in Britain’s jails identify as Muslims. That doesn’t mean all of them are equally targets for radicalisation, although some of them are, as indeed are some non-Muslims as well.
One recent estimate has put the number at risk at about 1,000. If true, that is evidence of a problem that indeed requires attention. It is in no one’s interest for prisons to become training grounds for radical extremism. Nor is it desirable that some institutions, or wings of prisons, should become exclusive to any particular faith group. On the contrary, what is needed are effective deradicalisation strategies, tailored to the individual prisoner, and ultimately the application of the same rehabilitative approach, which ought to be the ultimate purpose of all prison regimes.
The classic dilemma in dealing with strongly identifying groups in prisons is whether to concentrate those who cause a risk in a few places or to disperse them across as many as possible. Concentration keeps the radicals away from their prey, but it can provide a platform for grievances and a control nightmare. The Maze and Guantánamo Bay were prisons of this kind and both were very effective recruiting sergeants for the prisoners’ causes.
Yet if the extremist radicals are dispersed, control is dissipated. The way they are dealt with can then be at the mercy of the individual prison management, whose quality is highly variable. The vulnerable are also less protected from those who might try to radicalise them and whose proximity is always an allure. The temptation in either case, which Ms Truss appeared to endorse today, is to combine bits of the two approaches. Specialist isolation units are to be built in top security prisons. But the authorities will also keep those who cause the problems on the move, the so-called “ghost train” approach. None of these courses of action is a guaranteed success. None of them is cheap. Each is further complicated by the need to apply the strategy to remand prisoners, young prisoners and women.
Prisons will never provide the solution to the problem of Islamist extremism. That lies outside the prisons, not inside them. It will be the work of generations. But it is right to expect the prisons not to make the problem worse. It is essential to stem the growth of Islamist extremism both by hard and soft policy. Both are relevant. The allure of extremism will never be blocked by one at the expense of the other. It is right to want best practice – whether in terms of control, rehabilitation or penal alternatives – to be shared. Many other countries have more acute prison radicalisation problems than Britain does, serious though ours is.
