UK report warns of impact of extremist groups in prisons

LONDON: Britain’s prisons have failed to recognize the dangers of extremist “gang-type activity” and the impact of those groups has been underestimated for too long by authorities, an independent report into the prison service said.
The landmark review on “Terrorism in Prisons” said that for the last 15 years groups of prisoners had adopted “an anti-state Islamist stance” that condones or encourages violence toward non-Muslim prisoners, prison officers and the general public.
The review was commissioned after a 2019 attack near London Bridge in which Usman Khan, a convicted militant who had been released early from prison, killed two people.
The report said there was a clear strand of prison behavior that could be illustrated by referring to Khan’s time there. “Much but not all of it is related to Usman Khan’s role in extremist groups within the prison,” the review said.
Extremist group behavior had come to be seen as part of the prison landscape, the report said, and warned that militants who have been convicted of serious offenses tended to exert influence within groups of prisoners.
The report said there was an understandable fear of discriminating against Muslim prisoners generally by focusing on a particular “flavour of gang-type behavior.”
It cited a tendency to regard Islam as a “no-go area” leading both to a reluctance to focus on extremist group behavior and an overloading of responsibility on prison imams.
“The point is to ensure that terrorist-risk behavior…is nipped in the bud, and take action to ensure that extremist groups are not the dominant source of prisoner power and that prisoners do not feel the need to adopt particular pro-terrorist identities in order to fit in,” the review said.
After the review, justice minister Dominic Raab announced a raft of measures on Wednesday including the use of “Separation Centers” in prisons to target what the government said were “influential and charismatic terrorists” to keep them away from the main prison population.