Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

The ticking terror time bomb in our prisons

Flowers are left for Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones, who were killed in a terror attack, last November (Getty images)

This week saw the publication of an independent review into multi-agency arrangements that manage terrorist offenders released into the community. The report was ordered by the Government following the horrific murders committed by released Islamist extremist, Usman Khan in November of last year who was at the time subject to these arrangements and had convinced professionals he had given up terror. It provided a golden opportunity for radical proposals to overhaul a plainly broken risk management system. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a swing and a miss.

Risk assessment and threat management of ideologically motivated offenders is perhaps one of the most challenging tasks for criminal justice professionals. At the outset of his review, Jonathan Hall QC, our independent reviewer of terrorism legislation acknowledges this fact and it should not be underplayed. The price for total protection from the risk posed by terrorists in custody and on release would be the destruction of the liberal democracy they are trying to bring down. 

However, Hall then goes on to list some devastating failures of our current arrangements which ought to alarm Government. The usual suspects rear their weary heads – poor inter-agency communications, excessive bureaucracy, a failure to collect and transmit intelligence from prison, the tendency to focus and manage behaviour rather than overall risk, more apparent concern for the rights of the offender than community safety. A plodding data driven approach to dynamic risks. We have been here before.

But these deficiencies are dwarfed by the failures of the standard diagnostic tool for extremist risk, known as ERG 22.

Hall said that some of the tool’s users ‘seriously minimised’ the gravity of the offending, and ‘accepted the offender’s characterisation (and in some cases denials) of offences of which they had been convicted.

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