CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Shawcross has now disagreed publicly. The Home Office had, he said, ‘ignored’ key recommendations to beef up Prevent’s performance and the glass remained only ‘half full.’ I have some experience of bureaucratic sleight of hand at work when it comes to reviews and recommendations. When I was tasked by the Government to look into the Prison Service’s colossal and unforgivable failures in containing Islamist extremism a few years ago, I made 69 recommendations which were mysteriously repurposed into 11 without my consent; eight were finally accepted."
After a series of terror attacks earlier this year in Austria and France, the European Union, its member states, and the United Kingdom are taking new steps to reduce online extremism and stem the dissemination of terrorist propaganda.
According to a new report by the United Kingdom’s Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE), extremists of all spectrums, including neo-Nazis and the far right, have been exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to launch broad misinformation campaigns...
Three years ago, Darren Osbourne drove a van into a crowd of worshippers outside The Finsbury Park Mosque, killing one and wounding ten people. Osbourne was not a devout ideologue. He had become radicalized in less than a month through the rapid...
The terrorist attack in Streatham, London, carried out by Sudesh Amman has brought again to the forefront the radicalizing, violent teachings of Islamist propagandist Abdullah al-Faisal . Reports indicate that Amman possessed copies of Faisal’s...
The suicide attack that claimed the lives of at least 22 people outside the Manchester Arena on May 22 fits a pattern of terrorists targeting crowded areas to maximize civilian casualties, CEP said, in releasing updated reports on terror targets and...
On May 14, 2024, CEP hosted an online discussion to discuss the publication of "Screwed: Britain’s Prison Crisis and How to Escape It," by CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson, in conversation with CEP Advisor Liam Duffy.
Published on April 11, Screwed has been described as “pithy, provocative and justifiably angry” by Rory Stewart, the former U.K. Government minister for prisons.
Screwed is the inside story of the collapse of His Majesty’s Prison Service, told by someone who had a front-row seat to it all. Acheson went from officer to Governor in less than a decade, and during that time witnessed the uniformed organization he was proud to serve crumble into lethal disarray. Together, Acheson and Duffy explore the former’s brutal account of the politics and decisions that have left prisons in a state where rats roam and violence and intimidation are normalized.
What’s more, the most significant chapter of the book is devoted to the ongoing issue of extremism behind bars. Prisons around the world are struggling to come to grips with a growing extremist population and have thus been described as “incubators” for terrorism. In Britain alone, several plots and attacks have been linked to convicted terrorist offenders, while extremists have even conducted attacks behind prison walls. Ian Acheson, having previously led an official review into Islamist extremism in U.K. prisons, is well placed to explain and analyze the issues Western democracies face in managing their incarcerated extremists.
Book available here.
CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Prisons aren’t a new problem. Ian Acheson wrote about the decay of the high-sec estate for us last month; David Gauke painted a bleak portrait of the current spending settlement in December. A year ago, I examined the abject failure of the Government’s promise to have delivered 10,000 new jail places by 2020 (actual number delivered at that point: 206)."
CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson interviewed: "The state of Britain’s prisons is under renewed scrutiny as report after report describes more and more jails as overcrowded, filthy places, rife with vermin and violence."
CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "There’s precious little room for manoeuvre. We are perilously close to a time I can remember back in the mid-90s when governors refused to take convicted prisoners from court because there was no cell space left in their establishments. While numbers at the top fluctuate week by week, the trend only ever goes up, driven by courts getting rid of their backlogs and our tendency to sentence more offenders to longer spells in custody that only make prisoners worse."
Extremists: Their Words. Their Actions.
Fact:
On May 8, 2019, Taliban insurgents detonated an explosive-laden vehicle and then broke into American NGO Counterpart International’s offices in Kabul. At least seven people were killed and 24 were injured.
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