The French government said Tuesday it planned to stop segregating Islamist inmates due to worries the short-lived practice risked deepening radicalism in the country’s prisons rather than stemming its spread.
Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas said he would shut down four special wards that authorities had established inside prisons in recent years. Instead, the government plans to transform some of the wards into units where inmates will stay for four months to determine if they are hardened radicals. Anyone deemed dangerous will then be transferred to high-security facilities designed for violent inmates or to isolation wards, he added.
The new system cuts short the government’s experimentation with a therapeutic approach that aimed to “deradicalize” inmates through counseling while separating them from the prison’s general population. Authorities have long worried that French prisons have become an incubator for terror attacks, allowing petty criminals to come into contact with Islamist recruiters.
“I don’t use the term of deradicalization, I don’t think we can invent a vaccine against this temptation,” Mr. Urvoas told reporters.
France has spawned more Islamic State fighters than any other Western country. Faced with militants returning home battle-hardened from Syria and Iraq, the government launched a pilot program that placed some radical inmates together in the same cell block to limit their contact with other criminals.
But those units failed to fully isolate radicals from other inmates who were often kept in nearby cells. Some authorities worry the segregation measures actually helped radicals plot violence by bringing them together.
The initiative also stirred an internal debate among top officials in President François Hollande’s Socialist government. While some ministers publicly praised the measures as a long-overdue reform, other officials seethed in private, according to people familiar with the matter.
Former Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, who resigned in January to protest the government’s plans to strip terrorists of their French citizenship, expressed “grave reservations” over the idea of grouping radicals together.
Last month, an inmate held in one of the units for radicals allegedly stabbed two prison guards with a makeshift knife, launching an investigation by Paris prosecutors into whether he may have planned the attack with others inside the prison.
Under the plan announced Tuesday, up to 300 hardened radicals will be transferred to high-security facilities. Other terrorists and suspected radicals will be kept under close surveillance but will remain with the general inmate population, said Mr. Urvoas.
According to French authorities, there are 350 convicted or suspected terrorists awaiting trial in French jails, up from 90 in 2014. More than 1,300 inmates are suspected to be Islamist radicals.