Muslim inmates: how jail creates jihadis
“Don’t let off your celebratory party poppers just yet,” said Emma Webb in The Spectator. Anjem Choudary, the notorious hate preacher convicted last week of inviting support for Islamic State, may be heading for jail at last – but that doesn’t mean “his radicalising will stop”. In fact, Choudary’s recruiting talents (he is known to have had a personal connection with one in ten of all convicted Islamist terrorists in the UK) may prove even more effective in jail. In some prisons, 20% of inmates are Muslim; many are vulnerable and searching for a new identity. By locking up Choudary, we may be “letting a wolf loose among captive sheep”.
Terrorists always make troublesome prisoners, said The Guardian. The “classic dilemma” is whether to disperse them through the prison system (which risks spreading their toxic ideology over a wider field), or concentrate them in a few “supermax” prisons. This keeps the radicals “away from their prey”, but creates a symbolic focal point for grievances. The Maze and Guantánamo Bay both became “effective recruiting sergeants for the prisoners’ causes”. The new Justice Secretary, Liz Truss, is hoping to find some middle ground, said the Daily Mail. She announced this week that specialist isolation units will be built in top-security prisons, to hold the “most dangerous” terrorist convicts. Some will also be “ghosted”: moved between prisons to stop them building up networks of supporters. Her proposal is based on a report by the former prison governor Ian Acheson, which warns that Muslim inmates are already facing “aggressive encouragement” to become jihadis. Acheson claims that some warders turn a blind eye because they are afraid of seeming racist. Thus, Muslim inmates are being left unsupervised at prayers, and extremist literature is circulating in prison libraries.
None of these problems is wholly new, said Alan Travis in The Guardian. In 1994, five IRA men escaped from the supposedly high-security unit at Whitemoor Prison. They had “intimidated and then groomed” the prison staff to the point where “they were not only having lobster takeaways delivered to the special unit, but guns and even Semtex”. But housing Islamist terrorists under one roof has an added danger: unlike IRA members, most Islamists are “lone operators”, unconnected to any broader command structure. Bringing them together may give them a golden opportunity to create the kind of “hierarchical organisation” they so far lack. Quarantining jihadis behind bars may end up making them stronger.