It is time for the Home Secretary, and the Home Office, to supervise prisons as they did until the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) was formed in 2007 (out of the Home Office, due to Home Office admin failings). So argues Richard Walton, a former Head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, in his latest paper for the think-tank Policy Exchange. He says that a ministry for the judicial system is ‘discouraging the focus on public protection and security, which is central to the Home Office’s core historic purpose.
“There is a strong case that the management of terrorists both during their sentences and after release should be more closely aligned with the agencies who obtain, develop and analyse the relevant intelligence, namely the police, intelligence agencies and the Home Office. This does not appear to be the case at present.”
He writes that from experience, he knows that information sharing between the National Counter Terrorism Police Network and MI5 and prisons and the MoJ has been ‘routinely problematic over the past ten years’. He says it’s not uncommon for terrorist plots to germinate inside prison, ‘nor for other dangerous offenders to be subject to radicalisation by terrorist offenders, leading to a dangerous terrorist- organised crime nexus’, inside prison and later outside when offenders are let out. Despite the MoJ setting up a scheme for imprisonment of convicted jihadis in separate units within prisons – to minimise radicalisation of other prisoners – very few convicted terrorists have been separated in this way, ‘reportedly because of fear of anticipated human rights litigation’, according to Richard Walton. He hopes that if the Home Office were responsible for prisons, that department would not do what he terms ‘pre-emptive capitulation, before litigation’.
He sees inherent difficulties of two departments of state (and their ministers) managing the threat of terrorists and other seriously dangerous offenders in the public domain, through to prison and back out into the community. It should not be surprising therefore that intelligence on offenders is lost as the baton is passed between ministries, he says.
To read the paper in full visit the Policy Exchange website.
See also the article in the January 2021 print edition of Professional Security magazine, ‘The walls don’t work‘.
Photo by Mark Rowe; HMP Leicester.
