Prisoner Radicalization and Terrorism Detention Policy

Institutionalized Fear or Evidence-Based Policy Making?

Tinka Veldhuis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317423430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Correctional policies for Islamist violent extremist offenders are often based on the premise that prisons can be hotbeds of radicalization. The perception that inmates are susceptible to violent extremist belief systems has given rise to a fervent international public, political, and scholarly debate and has led to the introduction of drastic, often expensive policies to counter the threat of prison radicalization. But is the introduction of these policies justified?

A key question is whether violent extremist offenders should be concentrated in separate high-security prisons, or whether they should be integrated into the mainstream inmate population. Prisoner Radicalization and Terrorism Detention Policy argues that concentration strategies to manage violent extremist offenders are often flawed – based on untested, potentially false assumptions that are rooted in fear rather than in facts. Little academic evidence has been produced that can valuably inform policy making in this area. As a result, policies to detain violent extremist offenders may be inadequately tailored to achieve their objectives, and could even lead to an intensification of the violent extremist threat.

This book is the first to present a detailed and systematic case study of the decision-making and implementation process behind terrorism detention policy. It will be essential reading for students, scholars and policymakers researching criminal justice, terrorism and extremism.

1 Prisoner radicalization and terrorism detention policy

Since 9/11, the threat of Islamist terrorism has been at the forefront of public and political debate. At the time of finalizing this book, November 2015, the international media are filled with stories of young Muslims in Europe traveling to Syria to join the ranks of IS, a violent extremist movement aiming to establish an Islamic caliphate. The stories are about young Muslims, often born and raised in the West, radicalized to the point that they are willing to risk their own lives and take those of others in pursuit of the jihadist cause. In some cases, we hear of young Muslims dying in battle at the front. In others, we hear that individuals have left the conflict zone and are returning to their homes in the West. Almost invariably, the stories contain anxious warnings of the violent extremist threat coming to the West, as many young Muslims return home skilled and prepared to commit terrorist attacks against Western societies.

Throughout the West these threats triggered panicky responses by officials, with several countries arresting substantial numbers of individuals in relation to IS and the conflict in Syria. In the UK, more than 200 terror-related arrests were made in the first ten months of 2014 (Dodd, 2014), and the government warned that it intended to charge returning fighters with high treason (Groves and Greenwood, 2014). Other countries, such as Spain (Goodman, 2014), Belgium (Trouw, February 26, 2014), and the Netherlands (Groen, 2014), similarly set out to arrest returning jihadists or people suspected of planning to travel to Syria to join the jihad or of encouraging others to do so.

The rapid increase in the numbers of arrests and incarcerations of terror-related suspects raises an important question: where and how should these inmates be detained (e.g., Merola and Hovak, 2012)? After all, prisoners are often attributed prominent roles in the emergence and expansion of violent extremist movements, and it is often said that several extremist ideologies originated behind bars. If radicalized prisoners are subsumed into the larger inmate population, might there not be a risk that they will spend their time in prison planning terrorism attacks or recruiting fellow inmates? And if this is the case, and thus, if detaining violent extremist offenders as “regular” prisoners may convey a risk of further radicalization, then which detention strategies may offer an alternative way to manage this category of prisoners? Concerns that prisons can become incubators of violent extremism have pushed the issue of terrorism detention to the forefront of the international political agenda and have urged policy makers to craft correctional policy responses geared to minimize the risk of violent extremism among inmates.

Fears of prisoner radicalization are not new, but have been widespread since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when the subsequent Global War on Terror internationally led to an influx of terrorism-related suspects into the correctional system. Over the past decade, countries around the world have responded with urgency to the potential threat and have implemented a range of measures to contain the spread of extremist ideology in prisons. At first glance, two notable features of these policies stand out. First, they generally betray a “security first” approach, which is geared toward achieving instant control and risk management, often at the expense of prisoner rights or longer-term considerations such as reintegration. Second, it seems that nobody knows the best way to deal with terrorism offenders in prison: detention strategies differ substantially across countries. Whereas some countries isolate violent extremists from other prisoners, others disperse them across different prisons, and yet others primarily seek to “deradicalize” them and to persuade them to leave terrorism behind (Neumann, 2010).

In the Netherlands, the government has opted for a solution that concentrates prisoners suspected or convicted of terrorism-related charges into separate “terrorism wings,” where they are segregated from the mainstream inmate community, closely monitored, and subjected to restrictive security regimes (Veldhuis et al., 2011; see also Veldhuis and Lindenberg, 2012). In concentrating terrorism prisoners in specialized prison units, the Dutch approach is in accordance with famous examples like Guantanamo Bay and Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, as well as less familiar examples like the US federal prison system’s “Communications Management Units” (CMUs; US Department of Justice, 2010; see also Beata, 2012; Hamm, 2012), which were introduced to detain prisoners suspected of terrorism connections. A number of other countries, such as Saudi Arabia (Boucek, 2008), the Philippines (Jones and Morales, 2012; Jones, 2014), and Australia (Brown, 2008; Carlton, 2008) similarly opted for detention strategies that house violent extremists together in high-security facilities, away from other kinds of offenders.

Although fairly popular, it is not immediately clear how concentration policies are supposed to help. After all, it stands to reason that housing already radicalized prisoners together with like-minded peers might create opportunities for them to form close-knit groups and plot terrorism activities together, and that harsh confinement conditions may arouse anger and frustration and spur intensification of ideological commitment. Moreover, it is feasible that detainees in specialized terrorism prisons will become heroes in the eyes of their followers, thereby creating a stronger support base for violent extremist activities. Alternatively, they may also be labeled as terrorists and rejected as a consequence by the general public, which may cause reintegration problems after release and increase the risk of recidivism.

In fact, previous experiences with concentration policies for violent extremist prisoners, particularly in Ireland and Germany during the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrated that such policies ignited a range of undesired side effects, such as intense resistance among the prisoners, further mobilization of support for the inmates’ political objectives, and increased violence among their support community. Likewise, the imprisonment and confinement conditions of incarcerated members are central in the narratives of many violent extremist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood (Kepel, 2002), the Irish Republican Army (McEvoy, 2001), and, more recently, IS (McCoy, 2014), and appear to have been driving factors in the establishment of a support base for these movements.

Why concentrate and segregate such prisoners if the evidence, albeit sparse, as well as logical reasoning suggests that it is counterproductive? To answer this question, we would have to know how concentration policies come about and how they are implemented, why decision makers opt for concentration over other imprisonment strategies, and what outcomes such policies are expected to produce. At the moment, little is known about how concentration policies are developed and implemented, and thus it is important to take the time to thoroughly scrutinize how these policies come about. Are concentration policies based on sound rationale, or might they be dictated by time pressure, fear, and other short-term considerations?

The present study

The overarching aim of this book is to examine why and how concentration policies are implemented and whether or not the underlying decision-making process is based on sound reasoning. More specifically, this book explores the ways in which fear in the policy context can influence the development, implementation, and outcomes of such policies.

To this end, I select the Dutch policy as an example of similar strategies adopted in other countries, and provide an in-depth analysis of the different stages of the Dutch policy cycle. The Dutch terrorism detention policy was evaluated in 2010 (for the Dutch evaluation report, see Veldhuis et al., 2011). In this book, I partly rely on data collected for the evaluation study and build further on the findings by examining the role that fear may have played in the policy-making and implementation phases. Therefore, I aim first, to reconstruct the Dutch policy in some detail and second, to evaluate the policy against available evidence, in order to judge whether it is rooted in realistic assessments and valid assumptions (and can thus be expected to produce the desired results) or whether it is the product of external pressures in the decision-making context (and may consequently be inadequate and prone to unwanted outcomes).

The Netherlands provides a relevant case to examine concentration policies for terrorism offenders. First, as with other countries in Europe, after 9/11 the Netherlands experienced a heightened threat of Islamist violent extremism. The threat materialized in a lethal attack and several foiled plots, which triggered political and public concern about violent radicalization within Muslim communities (e.g., Bakker, 2006; Veldhuis and Bakker, 2009). In November 2004, filmmaker and Islam critic Theo van Gogh was brutally assassinated on the streets of Amsterdam. Van Gogh’s murderer, who was later arrested after being wounded in a shootout with the police, turned out to be a young Muslim of Moroccan descent who had been born and raised in the Netherlands. In the months following the assassination, the Islamist threat accumulated in a series of terrorism-related incarcerations and court cases (e.g., the Hofstad group case and the Piranha case; for discussions, see TTSRL, 2008; Schuurman et al., 2014), which were closely scrutinized by the media. The arrests pushed the issue of terrorism detention to the forefront of the national political and public agenda, and politicians and experts warned that the presence of extremist Muslims in prison could trigger radicalization among other inmates. One of the questions that I aim to answer in this study is how, given these circumstances, the relevant stakeholders interpreted the problem and how they weighed the available policy alternatives.

Second, the Dutch case is exemplary for other prominent countries like the US and Australia, which apply similar concentration policies for terrorism offenders. In the West, the Netherlands is probably the country that is most consistent in its implementation of the concentration policy (Neumann, 2010). The concentration policy denoted a drastic deviation from traditional prison policies in the Netherlands, which select prisoners for specific regime types on the basis of personal risk assessments rather than offense type (RSJ, 2006). Interestingly, after the results of the 2010 evaluation study of the concentration policy were publicized, the government decided to close the terrorism wing and disperse the remaining prisoners throughout the general inmate population. For a couple of years, the violent extremist threat was relatively low, and few extremist offenders were imprisoned. However, in 2014, when the threat from IS and the numbers of terrorism-related incarcerations increased again, the government decided to change its policy again and reinstalled the concentration policy; the terrorism wings were reopened in 2014. This raises the question of whether there is a strong underlying plan behind the government’s approach to the imprisonment of terrorism prisoners, and seems to suggest that external conditions such as an increased threat can have a strong influence on the decision-making process. When the objective is to obtain as much information as possible about the decisions of policy makers, cases where drastic policy decisions were made may be more informative than cases where policy continued as “business as usual.” Therefore, I aim to examine the dynamics of the decision-making process that led to the introduction of the concentration policy, to understand the underlying processes and assumptions on which the policy is based, and to assess whether it can logically be expected to produce the desired outcomes.

A realist approach to policy evaluation

The realist approach (Pawson and Tilley, 1997; Pawson, 2006) offers a useful framework for this kind of policy evaluation, and will also guide the research presented in this book. The realist approach belongs to a broader category of evaluation paradigms that interpret policies and programs as reflections of underlying theories (called “program theories”) about (how to change) human behavior (e.g., Bickman, 1987; Rossi et al., 1999). Often, the rationale behind policies is unclear and poorly articulated. The realist approach, therefore, recommends explicating the underlying ideas and assumptions about how policy is supposed to work and then evaluating these ideas against the available evidence (e.g., Pawson et al., 2005). In some cases, stakeholders’ ideas about policy functioning and outcomes may be correct. More often, however, they may be incomplete or flawed, so that the policy may produce unexpected outcomes. An important first step in policy analysis is, therefore, to evaluate whether or not the underlying ideas about how the policy should function are valid (Pawson and Tilley, 1997).

The realist approach is rooted in the appreciation that policy interventions can produce different outcomes under different circumstances. From a realist perspective, the question is thus not what works? Or whether this program works? But rather, what works for whom in what circumstances and in what respects, and how? (Pawson and Tilley, 1997). Consequentially, the approach recommends that policy reviewers should reconstruct stakeholders’ ideas about the underlying mechanism (M) whereby an intervention is supposed to produce the intended outcomes (O), and about t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Prisoner radicalization and terrorism detention policy
• Part I The making of terrorism detention policy: the terrorism wing
• Part II Theoretical and empirical observations on prisoner radicalization
• Part III Terrorism detention policy in practice: the implementation of the terrorism wing
• Part IV Captivated by fear
• Index