Perspective: DeradicalizationHow to Rehabilitate a Terrorist
The question of how best to rehabilitate terrorists is becoming more acute: As Islamic State’s “caliphate” collapsed, hundreds of fighters and fellow travelers returned to European countries, including Britain – and jails in England and Wales house a churning population of hundreds convicted of terrorist offenses. Keeping terrorists behind bars for too short a time is risky – but so is keeping them for much longer periods. Either way, inmates must be released eventually, writes The Economist. “If extra years behind bars are poorly funded and structured, they ‘risk making bad people worse,’ says Nick Hardwick, an ex-boss of the parole board.”
The 29 November terrorist knife attack on the London Bridge, in which the attacker killed two people before being shot dead by the police, raises timely questions about efforts to rehabilitate terrorists. As Islamic State’s “caliphate” collapsed, hundreds of fighters and fellow travelers returned to European countries, including Britain. Jails in England and Wales house a churning population of hundreds convicted of terrorist offenses. Keeping terrorists behind bars for too short a time is risky – but so is keeping them for much longer periods.
The Economist writes that, surprisingly, the police do not always support longer sentences. “Either way, inmates must be released eventually. If extra years behind bars are poorly funded and structured, they ‘risk making bad people worse,’ says Nick Hardwick, an ex-boss of the parole board.”
The Economist adds:
Regardless of sentence length, most criminologists favor investment in de-radicalization, which aims to strip terrorists of their motivating ideology, or “disengagement”, which has the more modest aim of dissuading convicts from future violence, even if they retain hardline views. John Horgan, an expert on extremism at Georgia State University, reckons there are 40-50 such schemes around the world.
Most involve counselling to get to the root causes of extremist sympathies. Britain already has two such schemes: one, in prison, is voluntary; another, on release, is mandatory. Measuring their success is hard. Security considerations mean governments are reluctant to allow academic evaluations. The small numbers and lack of an available control group would anyway make it tricky to draw quantitative conclusions. Even so, Mr. Horgan says, “the emerging conclusion seems to be that rehabilitation can work,” but only if prisoners are committed to changing their ways.
A qualitative assessment last year by academics judged Britain’s in-prison scheme to be working well. Most lags said it helped them understand why they offended and gave them reasons to avoid doing so. Britain’s policy of mixing jihadists with other criminals risks radicalizing non-terrorists. But it also exposes terrorist convicts to alternative viewpoints. One jihadist prisoner told a researcher that “being forced to mix for once” opened his eyes.
