Prisons must crack down on violent Islamist extremism – by stopping hand-wringing & virtue signalling for a start
SOCIETY is still not being properly protected from dangerous Islamist terrorists, who are in control of parts of our high-security prisons.
That is the alarming conclusion of the Government’s independent reviewer on terror, who produced a report on jail jihad yesterday that should be turning ministers’ hair white.
The headline findings of this latest report — which included the incredible fact that terrorists are setting up Sharia courts inside — did not surprise me though.
Six years ago I led an independent review of the same problem and made 69 recommendations for change, many of which were either ignored or watered down.
Like the new report’s author, Jonathan Hall, I found a service where officers were afraid to confront radicalisers on the wings in case they were accused of racism.
Too timid
Like him, I found Muslim gangs dominated by terrorists were taking control of power and space in places where they could poison others with their death-cult ideology with impunity.
READ MORE SUN STORIES
Like him, I found a breathtaking lack of grip by senior officials to even know the scale of the problem, let alone deal with it.
In 2016, I recommended that special Separation Units were created to weed out and place the most subversive and violent extremists to isolate them from their targets — violent and credulous young men who could be programmed for terrorism.
These units were created but, as Mr Hall discovered, the bureaucracy created to fill the units meant that they could never be used to their full potential.
This was because they were opposed by senior officials either too timid or too incompetent to take on the hate preachers, Justice Secretary Dominic Raab, the latest in a merry-go-round of prisons ministers and Lord Chancellors, has welcomed the report and made a commitment to start getting Separation Centres to work.
Most read in News
It is already clear that in the case of those few prisoners that do get placed in separation units, there is an immediate benefit for the prisons they were removed from.
It is hard to inspire others to kill from behind a layer of concrete hundreds of miles from your target audience.
As I said to ministers at the time, we need to turn such profoundly dangerous people into ghosts.
Their rights must always be subordinate to those of the officers, prisoners and wider society that their radicalisation threatens.
Mr Hall was politely scathing about the confusion around who was responsible for managing the risk terrorist prisoners represent.
The culture of avoidance and hand-wringing I saw in 2016 is still alive and well, with bosses more interested in critical race theory, identity politics, taking the knee and other progressive virtue signalling than cracking down on violent extremism.
Islamist terrorists do not care about the religion, gender or ethnicity of their targets.
Worldwide, the number of Muslims killed by these extremists far exceeds that of any other religion.
In this country, Islamist terror dwarves neo-Nazi extremism.
Yet prison officials and others in our protective services fear naming and dealing with people capable of enormous harm because of misplaced sensitivity.
Ironically, it is exactly that abdication of responsibility that will mobilise our small but growing extreme right-wing terror threat.
After presumably wading through piles of policy verbiage in vain search for the word “terrorism”, Hall was forced to recommend that governors are held personally accountable for countering terror in prisons.
That is something that will likely baffle readers who expect their prison service to be doing so anyway.
It is clear from his report that the police and Crown Prosecution Service are also too fond of looking the other way when it comes to detecting and prosecuting terror crimes happening behind the prison walls.
Hall wants a step change, with a new approach and legislation to send a clear message to those acting with impunity to glorify or otherwise support violent extremists that they are “touchable” by the law and will be spending much more time locked up if they continue with their repugnant ways.
Shocking blind spot
The police and CPS have for years been happy to let prisons deal with their own disciplinary problems, rather than pursue such offenders.
That must change.
Deterrence is not going to work on terrorists serving 45 years behind bars but it will definitely cause inmates serving far shorter sentences to think twice before associating with them.
So, Dominic Raab has promised more training for staff, less tolerance of coercive control of them by extremists and more robust separation of hate-mongers. As did his predecessors.
I read a report in The Times that said one of the key reasons that ministers rejected my 2016 recommendation to create an independent adviser on prison terrorism reporting to them was that prison bosses feared it would be me.
Read More on The Sun
Jonathan Hall has admirably filled in where that shocking blind spot still exists. There is new momentum and new blood in prison counter-terrorism that is a game changer.
READ MORE SUN STORIES
But will this determination stick or drain away again? Only Mr Raab can know.
- Ian Acheson is a former prison governor and counter-terrorism expert.
We pay for your stories!
Do you have a story for The Sun news desk?
Email us at [email protected] or call 0207 782 4104. You can WhatsApp us on 07423 720 250. We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours