UK Edition
Islamist terrorists are taking psychology courses to help them deceive prison bosses into believing they are deradicalised, a former prisoner governor and government adviser has said.
Prof Ian Acheson, who led a Ministry of Justice review of extremism in jails, said there was growing evidence across Europe that terrorist prisoners were successfully deceiving professionals into believing they were willing to rehabilitate, with potentially deadly consequences.
He cited four cases in the past two years of terror attacks and prison murder attempts where Islamist extremists had been able to mount them after securing new freedoms on release or in jail due to their ability to manipulate the authorities into thinking they had given up jihad.
In a paper to be published on Tuesday by the Europe in the World programme, Prof Acheson said many violent extremists, particularly hardcore jihadists, often viewed their imprisonment as a test of their commitment to their cause and an opportunity to continue their jihad.
“During their sentence, they look for ways to convince those with whom they interact (prison officers, social workers, psychologists, supervisors) that they have understood the error of their ways and have turned over a new leaf to speed up their release,” he said.
“In some cases, jihadists have opted to study psychology. While on the surface, this [studying] could be perceived as a positive step forward, they use what they learn to better manipulate the work of prison therapists,” said Prof Acheson.
He named the technique “disguised compliance” as the most dangerous form of deception, where terrorists gained an advantage over those monitoring them, avoiding scrutiny, concealing their true intentions and securing benefits in prison that could be at odds with public protection.
It enabled terrorists to game deradicalisation programmes. “Generic, predominantly psychosocial interventions delivered by poorly skilled practitioners without cultural or religious competence are inherently easier to manipulate and ‘game’. It is little wonder that deception thrives in these situations,” he said.
He cited the case of Kujtim Fejzulai, who killed four people in 2020. The Austrian government admitted Fejzulai had “fooled” its deradicalisation into allowing him early release.
There was also the London Bridge terrorist Usman Khan, who was attending a conference for rehabilitated individuals on the day of his attack, in which he deliberately targeted those who had been assisting his reintegration.
One of the extremists who nearly killed a prison officer in the high-security Whitemoor jail in 2020 had been earmarked just two days earlier for a certificate of achievement for his participation in a deradicalisation course.
In France, Bilal Taghi, sentenced to 28 years for the attempted murder of two French prison officers in 2016, boasted in court that he had deliberately lowered the guard of his targets by appearing to be a model prisoner who was approachable and “chatty”.
“The stakes of disguised compliance remain extremely high,” said Prof Acheson.
His paper, published with Amanda Paul, makes recommendations including “preventative custodial measures” for terrorists released from jail if they are considered still radicalised, and “minimised contact” between Islamists in prison to prevent them passing on know-how on gaming the system.
Terrorists observe our posture and react accordingly – we must do better
By Prof Ian Acheson
Everybody lies but when violent extremists deceive us the results can be catastrophic. Two recent inquests into terror attacks in London either side of Christmas 2019 have laid bare how deception played a role in allowing Islamist extremists to manipulate credulous and naive professionals, to commit murder and mayhem on our streets.
The problem is not confined to this country. Austria’s interior minister confessed that the Islamist perpetrator of a gun rampage that killed four people just over a year ago had “fooled” professionals involved in deradicalisation programmes to such an extent he was allowed early release from prison.
While we don’t know if deception played a role in the alleged terrorist murder of Sir David Amess, we know the prime suspect was subjected to enhanced screening by our Prevent counter-terrorism programme. What more can we do to stop ideologically motivated killers from pulling the wool over our eyes?
On Tuesday, my organisation, the Counter Extremist Project, launches Hiding in Plain Sight – a discussion paper which I co-authored with a colleague from the European Policy Centre.
The paper is built on discussions between international experts from frontline practitioners to clinical psychologists to propose ideas for strengthening our protective services to detect and defeat what we call “disguised compliance”. In other words we wanted to know what more could be done to test the authenticity of the relatively small number of terrorist offenders if and when they say they have recanted a commitment to violence.
While this area of enquiry is hardly new, very little has been written about how we interpret the behaviour of human beings who are ideologically motivated. Given the lengthening list of convicted terrorists and other extremists who have sailed straight through our threat screening safety net, ministers ought to be acutely interested in this work. While terrorists do not kill a great number of citizens, the effect of their work is magnified out of all proportion to the harm caused. Not dealing with the problem works for violent extremists as a successful attack makes us more fearful, more divided and hastens attacks on basic liberty in the name of national security. Getting upstream of this problem is therefore good for liberal democracy and bad for those who want us to destroy it for them.
What can be done? We acknowledge that human beings are not terribly good lie detectors. That said, in terms of the people who are tasked with the unenviable job of discerning fake from real we see well-meaning professionals who inhabit a different moral universe to their subjects, using methodologies that are built from classical criminological theory. In terms of dealing with Islamist extremism or its pale image on the extreme Right, this is rather like parachuting explorers into an alien landscape relying on maps drawn in crayon and guesswork.
It is little wonder then that the crude interventions that we have do not seem capable of sorting the lone wolf from the sheep. As an example, the Health Identity Intervention programme – one of our counter-terrorism mainstays in prisons – when reviewed, relied on positive feedback from the subject as one metric for success. It is little wonder that the released terrorists we spoke to back in 2015 laughed about how easy this programme – which the Prison Service used to boast about as “world class” – was to game.
In our paper we make 13 recommendations. We need to fundamentally change the people and the systems we use to measure and manage terrorist risk in custody and on release.
One unified multi-disciplinary team getting to know a terrorist offender in detail from conviction to reintegration is much more likely to detect false compliance than the complicated system we currently rely on, which was excoriated by the inquest juries as “seriously deficient” in almost every respect. Breaking the professional cartel that sustains this broken system is not easy, particularly as they too often mark their own homework after a tragedy and show scant signs of humility after catastrophic system failures. But ministers must grasp this nettle now.
Other innovations include: blended therapies using more than one key worker to prevent conditioning, individualised treatment programmes that replace generic “sheep dips”, post-release preventative detention, a massive increase in the use of technology to collect bio and location data to establish behavioural benchmarks, and a replacement of “collusive” encounters between therapist with a more assertive approach of the kind used by psychiatrists when working in the family courts. We also suggest that communities should play a far greater role in monitoring offenders released from custody, something that would have the additional benefit of knitting citizens back into a common pattern of national security partnership.
There is much more we can do and the stakes could not be higher. Acting now and acting radically, ministers can avoid the counsel of despair that has become the default response of far too many of our protective agencies after far too many failures. We are at the start of this debate. In the meantime, terrorists observe our posture and react accordingly. We can and we must do better.