Interesting piece in the London Times on the Blair government’s ‘strategy’ for dealing with terrorists/terrorist suspects in jail:

There are approximately 4,000 Muslim prisoners incarcerated in Britain, including the greatest number of terrorist suspects of any European country. It is a myth that they are kept separate from the rest of the prison community. The majority reside in high-security institutions, including Belmarsh, southeast London, but remain on normal wings because of lack of resources. The Prison Officers Association believes recruitment to extreme causes is going on, but is rendered helpless to stop it by circumstances ranging from language barriers to bureaucracy. A working group has been set up to monitor the problem. Until it reports, nobody moves. “There is little hard evidence that it is happening to date,” says Peter Atherton, the Deputy Director-General of the Prison Service. Maybe he needs to get out more. Recruitment of disaffected young males in prison has been a fact of life for centuries, and a serious issue for the West since Richard Reid, the thwarted shoe-bomber, turned out to have been a product of Feltham young offenders institution, where a visiting imam with links to Abu Hamza is believed to have radicalised teenagers. As early as 2000 Jack Straw, the former Home Secretary, was told that radical imams were operating in prisons. Meanwhile, four men await trial in America accused of a plot to attack Jewish and Israeli targets in the Los Angeles area. They are thought to be members of the Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (Assembly of Authentic Islam) group that has been active in California state prisons since 1997. Even in France where only 99 out of 60,000 prisoners have links to terrorism, 175 acts of proselytism were recorded last year. Some could have been benign; prison is tough and faith can get people through. However, in September 2005 Safe Bourada, an Algerian terrorist, was apprehended near Paris having allegedly set up a cell comprised of former prisoners that he had converted during a ten-year sentence for attacks on the Paris metro system. Prisons are full of angry and resentful men: fertile territory for radicals through the ages.

Food for thought, but there’s not a lot of evidence that the government is thinking. Read the whole thing.