The Government’s independent terror watchdog is barking. That’s all the levity I can squeeze out of Jonathan Hall QC’s worrying latest report on the operation of our terrorism laws, published earlier this week.
Mr Hall has taken a particular and welcome interest in how terrorism operates in prisons and how the law interacts with the violent extremism manufactured and magnified therein. As he says, increasingly, the capture and conviction of ideologically inspired offenders is very much, ‘job not done’.
What happens to terrorist offenders inside our prisons has huge significance for their future potential targets on either side of the walls. There have been at least four terrorist attacks committed by serving or released prisoners over the last three years, resulting in death, serious injury, public outrage and emergency legislation. Other disrupted plots support the claim that prisons are places where the networking and grooming of violent young men searching for meaning continues unabated. This capability has been temporarily suppressed by draconian Covid restrictions, but as the pandemic lockdown is eased and our prisons return to their normal state of chronic instability, there is little reason for complacency.
I’ve long been concerned about interventions created to deal with this threat that are too generic and too collusive to produce meaningful change. Released terrorist prisoners told me in 2016 that the flagship therapy used then and now, Healthy Identity Intervention, was laughably easy to ‘game’ to deceive naïve therapists who were often a moral universe away from their subjects. Deception can be seen by violent extremists, particularly Islamists, as not only a useful way of drawing attention away from their activities, but even a divine duty.
Disrupting DDP
For all that scepticism, even I was taken aback by Mr Hall’s description of how some terrorists openly subverted the other main Desistence and Disengagement Programme (DDP), jointly run by the Home Office and Ministry of Justice. DDP is a blended programme of mentoring and practical, ideological and psychological assistance for serving and released prisoners.
These subjects now include either those convicted of terrorism or who are assessed as ‘developing extremists.’ The objective is to change their toxic mindset. Hall cited examples of offenders on this course causing ‘significant disruption’ by feigning sleep, reading books, wearing headphones and taking extended toilet breaks in a brazen and contemptuous display of non-compliance. It’s plainly absurd – and counterproductive – to compel prisoners to participate in such programmes. But there is no evidence of any serious sanction for highly dangerous people who seem to be blatantly abusing the system. There ought to be and if the law doesn’t provide for this it ought to be changed forthwith. Certainly for those terrorist offenders now serving extended sentences following legislation that emerged from the Streatham and London Bridge attacks of 2018/19 there still seems very little in the way of assertive management of those who pose the greatest risk.
Moreover, both the Healthy Identity intervention and DDP have never been formally evaluated, despite having been the mainstays of our terrorist treatment programme for years. The lack of intellectual diversity and secrecy around HM Prison and Probation service is well known to those of us who have worked in it. It was only recently revealed that another flagship sex offender treatment programme in place for years had the effect in some cases of making participants worse.
One of the contributory factors for this failing was noted as a slavish adherence to manuals rather than the needs of the individual offender. This same criticism is levelled at aspects of both ‘in-house’ created programmes now in use for terrorists. It is a sobering fact that Usman Khan, who went on to murder two young people at Fishmongers Hall in November 2018, was a graduate of the Healthy Identity Intervention and had been on the Desistence and Disengagement Programme. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that far from deterring him, these untested programmes may have pushed him further along that fatal trajectory with his victims. This is an area which should receive the fullest scrutiny in the forthcoming inquests on him and his unfortunate victims.
There must be room for risk-taking and innovation in managing the risks posed by terrorist offenders. This is a profoundly difficult challenge. Moreover, we simply do not have enough evidence yet for what might work to change them. In the meantime, we certainly need to be prepared for the possibility that nothing might for a small number of prisoners whose risk to the public will need to be safely and humanely contained, perhaps indefinitely. Recent research, hungrily seized on by those who have built reputations on minimising the threat, suggests that the risk of reconviction of this special cohort is very low.
There are two flies in the ointment here. Firstly, being caught and convicted again is a poor proxy for some very sophisticated people who may well be re-engaged in a terrorist lifestyle under the imperfect radar of official scrutiny. Secondly, even if we accept a reconviction rate of 5% as is often cited, on current custodial figures that could mean there are at least another 11 Reading Park atrocities in the pipeline. That figure excludes the unknown numbers of people convicted of other crimes who are currently being radicalised across our chaotic jail system. What government could withstand those odds?
These events are not inevitable. They are greatly accelerated, in my view, by the bewildering bureaucratic response to the current theat. I’ve lost count of the numbers of joint committees, cross-departmental working groups and adjuncts to existing structures that our terrorist problem has spawned. Extraordinarily, the Ministry of Justice was describing this dogs breakfast as ‘world-leading’ in March 2020, just months after two released terrorist prisoners painted London’s streets with blood. Current evidence would surely suggest that this Heath Robinson approach is not working. We have a system of terrorist and extremist risk management that is organisationally and philosophically broken and that provides for the building of empires rather than public safety.
The answer is simple. We must have one multi-disciplinary executive terrorist risk management agency managing the journey of the prisoner from conviction to reintegration. That agency should throw out the failed generic, sheep dip psycho-social interventions that aren’t working and instead manage the risk through an individualised treatment programme that focuses on the pre-radicalisation phase to identify preventive and predictive factors in their route into and, by extension, out of violent extremism.
It’s not that operationally complex but it would be expensive to do right and there would have to be blood on the carpet in the various fiefdoms that are currently not delivering us the security we deserve. Mr Hall has done the Government a service in again pointing out the deficiencies of our current approach. Terrorists read the room constantly. It’s time for ministers to do the same.
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