Caged fervour

AFTER nightfall one Saturday in January 2015, Bilal Taghi set off on a road trip with two friends, his wife and their infant child. They left their home town of Trappes, near Paris, bound for a wedding in Turkey, they said. About 400km (250 miles) from the border with Syria, where they hoped to join Islamic State (IS), their car overturned. Arrested in Turkey, they were expelled to France and convicted earlier this year of association with planned terrorist activities. Mr Taghi, a 24-year-old French citizen, was jailed in a special unit at a prison in Osny, near Paris, set up to isolate detainees linked to terrorism.

Earlier this month, Mr Taghi was taken from his cell at Osny for a routine exercise session. Hidden under a towel, he clutched a sharp metal rod, fashioned from his cell window. Summoned by a prison guard, the inmate turned on him, stabbing him nine times, and then slashed a second guard in the face and arm; both survived.

With all of the recent terrorist attacks in France—most recently a failed plot to blow up a car near Notre-Dame cathedral—the bloody attack in Osny barely made the news. Yet it exposed a fraught policy dilemma: how to manage the incarceration of Islamists so as to curb jihadist ideology inside prisons? This is not only a French problem. Britain announced recently that it would reverse its policy of dispersing such inmates, and instead build segregated units for those linked to terrorism. Concern mounted in August after the conviction of Anjem Choudary, a British-born Islamist preacher linked to IS, who has vowed to “radicalise everyone in prison”.

Prison recruitment is worrying because inmates have access to an underworld of weapons and violence. Anxiety is especially acute in France, where several terrorists in recent attacks were groomed while serving jail terms—and where the Muslim incarceration rate is very high. Muslims make up an estimated 8-10% of France’s population (the exact share is unknown because collecting religious statistics is banned). Yet they are perhaps 60% of prison inmates, according to a parliamentary report. Farhad Khosrokhavar, the author of a forthcoming book, “The Prisons of France”, says a more realistic estimate is 40-50%, with 60-70% only in certain big prisons near Paris. Such skewed proportions are not unique: in England and Wales, 15% of the prison population is Muslim, compared with 5% of the population. But the French ratio appears to be particularly high.

The French experiment with segregation, launched in 2014, involves five units inside existing prisons, one in the northern city of Lille and the others at Fresnes, Osny and Fleury-Mérogis, near Paris. The latter also houses Salah Abdeslam, the sole survivor of the terrorist commando unit behind the Bataclan attacks in November 2015. The most dangerous prisoners, such as Mr Abdeslam, are held in solitary confinement. He exercises, eats and reads alone in a special cell, equipped with a rowing machine, under 24-hour video surveillance. The segregated units are for the other jihadist inmates. The idea is to keep them as far as possible from other prisoners, and to put them through programmes of “deradicalisation”.

The justice ministry says it is too soon to evaluate the policy. In theory, the teams of educators and mentors in the units could help turn young minds away from jihadism. But the attempted assassination at Osny, the first such attack in the new units, is not a good sign. According to Le Monde, security footage shows Mr Taghi’s fellow prisoners sharing big fragments of broken mirror shortly after the attack. Was there a wider plot that never took place?

Toying with the authorities

The main flaw, says Jean-François Forget, head of UFAP-UNSA, a prison-guards’ union, is the “failure to make isolation watertight”. The units are installed in prisons which are already shockingly overcrowded. Fleury-Mérogis has 4,400 inmates for 2,340 places. And the layout of some buildings makes it difficult to prevent contact with other prisoners. At Fresnes, a report in June by France’s official prison watchdog noted a practice it calls yoyotage: inmates in the special unit share notes and items with ordinary prisoners on different floors via yoyos between cell windows.

Even when the units are properly isolated, inmates can meet. Those in segregation have the same rights to exercise or use the library as other prisoners. Osny’s special unit keeps inmates in individual cells, but they take part in a daily two-hour exercise session in the prison yard. “They wander around, take part in social activities and sport,” says Mr Forget: “Many are using this contact time to proselytise.”

Not all detainees are former combatants with blood on their hands. Some have been jailed for, say, attempting to leave France for Syria. The risk is that the units turn into organised camps for jihadism, setting up networks and links, if not command structures. Countering this within prison walls is hard. Deradicalisation programmes are still experimental. Providing moderate forms of religious activity is difficult: France has only 178 Muslim prison chaplains, compared with 684 Catholic ones, for a total prison population of 68,000. Besides, piety plays only a small role in radicalisation. The inmates most vulnerable to “falling under the spell of jihadists”, says Mr Khosrokhavar, are the psychologically disturbed.

French policymakers, anxious over the lure of jihadism, are struggling to find the right response. The prison watchdog concluded that it was “not in favour” of segregated units. Jean-Jacques Urvoas, the justice minister, told a parliamentary commission in June that he was aware of possible “perverse effects”. Better mentoring, or exchanges with those who have renounced jihad, could help, as might psychiatric care. But there are no easy options for handling potentially violent prisoners susceptible to extremism. Segregated units may be the best of a bad bunch.