CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Aldous Huxley’s dystopian best seller Brave New World, published back in 1934, envisaged a society where stability was enforced by a numbing drug called ‘soma’. Constant consumption of soma, mandated by the state, dulled the senses, vanished despair and discouraged rebellion. I was reminded of this by comments made by some of the Times‘ new crime commissioners as they launch a year-long project to fix our broken criminal justice system. They were speculating as to why we weren’t seeing a national jail insurrection similar to what happened here in the spring of 1990 when multiple prisons across the country exploded in violent disorder. After all, many of the precursors that existed then are now present once again: severe overcrowding, demoralised and overwhelmed staff, endemic brutality and squalor.” 

"Professor Ian Acheson, a former prison governor and author of Screwed: Britain's Prison Crisis and How To Escape It, was shocked when he came across the figures."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson: "Every morning, men and women serving on the front line of His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service pull on a cheap uniform and go to work in what's been called the most hostile work environment in Europe.

The endemic violence in our jails means many of them are ending their shifts in hospital rather than home with their families.

A month ago, an officer went on duty on B wing in HMP Whitemoor, one of our maximum security prisons. He left in an ambulance and was put on a ventilator, unconscious, after a vicious assault."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "The high-security prison system – the specialist jails where hundreds of the worst offenders in the system such as predatory rapists, child murderers, organised crime bosses, and terrorists end up – is in trouble."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Synthetic drugs exploded across the prison estate causing devastation and helping entrench a drugs economy led by organised crime that is now almost too big and too lucrative to fail. My independent Government review of Islamist extremism revealed a senior management of the prison service defined by endless, useless layers of bureaucracy unable or unwilling to stop terrorists in the making. Instead of tackling these major problems, this invisible and unaccountable boss class busied itself with virtue signalling. I still can’t get over the Director General of the Prison Service piously ‘taking the knee’ outside a prison where you would hesitate to house cattle. A vivid representation of a law enforcement agency in terminal decline."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "It is impossible to imagine how frontline staff operating in this squalor could raise their game enough to manage the inevitable confrontation of denying extremist prisoners the material they need to spread their hateful ideologies. They can’t even keep the bins empty. Taylor observed that ‘there is no better sign of decline in a prison than a lack of cleanliness’. He’s right. It’s one thing to remove any ambiguity in the rules to avoid staff being bamboozled and intimidated by people using religion as an excuse to undermine security. It’s quite another to make sure staff enforce these rules and deal with the kickback."

"Ian Acheson of the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) carried out the independent review into Islamist extremism behind bars. His principal recommendation was about Friday Prayers, however it was rejected by the government. Speaking to The Epoch Times, the former prison governor welcomed the measures, but criticised the length of time it had taken the MoJ to put them in place."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "We know a depressing amount of information about terrorists who have managed to evade detection and carry out atrocities in this country, mainly through public inquiries and inquests. But what about those who have failed in their crimes? What are we doing with them and why does it matter?"

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "But now, our high-security jails are filled with Islamist extremists who operate by markedly different standards. While the U.K. and Spain grappled with Irish and Basque separatists, these terrorists were not aiming for a worldwide caliphate that would subjugate all other faiths and make war on liberal democracy as such. Nor, despite their immense cruelty, did the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) or Basque Homeland and Liberty (ETA) operate under the pretext of divine permission to murder civilians."