France knew it had a problem with Islamic radicalisation in its prisons long before it became clear that two of the three gunmen who carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack in January last year had first met both each other and a dangerous al-Qaida-linked militant in the country’s largest jail.
But it was not until after the shootings, which claimed 17 lives at the satirical magazine’s offices and a kosher supermarket in Paris, that measures were announced to counter the mounting risk of the country’s prisons becoming recruitment centres for many more homegrown extremists.
Amédy Coulibaly, who killed five people, and Chérif Kouachi, who with his brother Saïd shot dead 12 more, befriended each other and convicted extremist Djamel Beghal in Fleury-Mérogis jail south of Paris.
It is now one of five prisons around France that place selected extremists – most convicted of terror offences – in separate blocks, aiming to prevent extremist ideology spreading and allowing for improved surveillance.
Trialled at Fresnes prison outside Paris, the controversial regime – which could eventually be introduced in 26 jails around the country – groups 20-25 radicals together in a secure unit with restricted access to social and recreational activities, the internet and the telephone.
Inmates are selected based on the supposed radicalisation threat they represent using a “detection grid” assessing personality, background and observed religious behaviour. France has also recruited nearly 400 extra warders, social workers, psychologists and surveillance specialists for its larger prisons, as well as more Muslim chaplains. Despite a recent recruitment drive, France still has only around 180 Muslim prison chaplains, compared with 700 Catholics.
Potentially, the scale of the problem France is attempting to address is alarming. Secularism laws forbid statistics based on ethnicity or religious belief, but the sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar calculated in a groundbreaking study in 2004 that about 50% of France’s 70,000 prisoners were of Muslim origin – a figure that rises to 70% in large short-term jails around major cities and stands in stark contrast to the proportion of Muslims in the population as a whole, 8-10%.
Many of France’s Muslim prisoners are disadvantaged and disaffected young men from communities blighted by poverty and unemployment. In overcrowded prisons, guarded by overworked, often inexperienced and intimidated warders, and with few Muslim chaplains to provide more moderate guidance, they can be easy prey for jihadi recruiters.
The path from petty criminal to radical Islamist via prison is well trodden: the Charlie Hebdo gunmen as well as Mohamed Merah, who shot seven people dead in Toulouse in 2012, and Mehdi Nemmouche, accused of four murders at the Jewish museum in Brussels in 2014, were undoubtedly at least part-radicalised in prison.
But the isolationist approach has been heavily criticised. “There is a risk of seeing prison as the only place where radicalisation takes place,” said Ouisa Kies, a sociologist. “It is certainly fertile ground. But 80% of people currently in prison for Islamist terror offences were not radicalised in prison. People are radicalised elsewhere: at school, on the street, on the internet ... “
The government acknowledges that of the 170-odd known radical Islamists in French jails for terror offences in 2015, only 16% had previously done time.
The attacks that killed 130 people in Paris last November are a case in point: while the five French nationals who were part of the Franco-Belgian terror cell that attacked the Bataclan concert hall, Stade de France and a string of Paris cafes and restaurants were mostly flagged as suspected radicals and had travelled to Syria to fight with Islamic State, only one had previously been jailed.
Besides human rights concerns, the many critics of France’s isolation regime – including Adeline Hazan, the head of France’s prisons watchdog – argue that placing extremists together could increase the risk of future attacks. “We are creating a ‘hard core’ of radicalism, with information exchanged about actions outside,” saidAlexandre Giuglaris of the Institut pour la Justice pressure group.
Some have highlighted the risk that in the hands of untrained prison officers, the “detection grid” could increase the risk of radicalisation by identifying the wrong candidates for a secure block or failing to identify the right ones: devout but moderate Muslims may be mistaken for extremists, while a new generation of proselytisers have become adept at disguising themselves as moderates.
Others stress the urgent necessity of recruiting young Muslim prison workers and imams more in tune with younger inmates and familiar, in particular, with social media; still more criticise the fundamental lack of a properly structured deradicalisation programme inside the secure blocks.
Countering radicalisation in prison remains, said leading criminologist Alain Bauer, a conundrum: “Concentrating extremists together will reinforce them; dispersing them allows them to spread their ideas and find new recruits.”