Prisoners who refuse to join radical Islamist gangs are having to be placed in segregation units for their own safety, The Times can reveal.
Officers at HMP Frankland in Co Durham, one of the highest-security jails in Britain, are keeping vulnerable prisoners apart from Islamic extremists in an effort to maintain order and discipline.
The jail has become so overrun with Islamic gangs that its “terrorist separation centres”, built to stop terrorists from radicalising other prisoners, have become obsolete.
Instead, other prisoners are forced into the isolation units to protect them because they are at risk of being attacked and face death threats if they refuse to join the gangs.
The prison has been accused of appeasing fundamentalists amid a power struggle between radical Islamists and other inmates that is mirrored in many British jails.
Ian Acheson, a former prison governor who also served in the Home Office as the director of community safety, warned that a failure to tackle this issue represented a “national security threat” and could lead to race riots in prisons.
Acheson blamed “weak leadership at the top distracted by progressive fads” and those who are “scared by allegations of racism”.
Tony Wyatt, a leading criminal defence barrister at Christian-Wyatt Law, discovered that isolation units were being used to protect inmates from Islamist gangs when visiting clients at Frankland. He said the breakdown in discipline and order was forcing some prisoners to serve their sentences in “total lockdown”.
He said: “There are so many who are members of Muslim gangs in prison, you just can’t contain the problem. If the solution was to separate them — and I’m not suggesting it is — you would need entire prisons dedicated to that separation. And not just one prison, multiple prisons. That’s the scale of it.
“The reality is that these units have become a refuge for those targeted by extremist gangs. Prisoners who stand up to Islamist gangs, refuse to convert, or challenge their authority are being placed in segregation for their own protection.
“Some prisoners are living under the most severe security conditions — near-total lockdown, no meaningful education or rehabilitation — not because they pose a threat to others, but because the system cannot keep them safe from powerful Islamist gangs.”
A report in 2022 by Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, found that terrorists had been able to seize control of wings and set up sharia courts in some prisons in England and Wales without resistance from prison staff, who were afraid of being accused of Islamophobia if they intervened.
He found that Islamic extremists had sought to dictate the diets and washing habits of non-Muslim prisoners and had set up sharia courts to deliver punishments such as flogging.
They escaped punishment by arguing that their prison cells did not come under the jurisdiction of terrorism laws.
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Frankland, which houses some of the most dangerous criminals in the country, is one of three jails in England and Wales with a separation centre reserved for the most dangerously ideological prisoners.
There are a total of 28 places across the three prisons, although at the time of the last inspection of separation centres by the prisons watchdog in 2022, only nine of the places were being used and the unit at Full Sutton near York was closed altogether.
Considerable resources are deployed in the separation centres to try to deradicalise the inmates but Charlie Taylor, HM chief inspector of prisons, found that the inmates in the separation centre had collectively decided not to engage with the regime. He said “opportunities were missed to think more creatively about how to work with prisoners”.
Acheson said the forced isolation of vulnerable prisoners in Frankland reflected the wider problems in the prison estate.
He warned that failing to address the threat of Islamism in prisons would fuel the far-right, which he warned was the fastest growing ideological group in prisons.
“Rather than tackle the problem of Islamist influence at Frankland, the prison appears to be choosing to take the path of least resistance in segregating prisoners who are challenging it,” he said.
“This response brings into focus a power struggle that is going on in many prisons including those holding out highest national security risk between Islamist gangs and other prisoners.
“A failure to tackle these issues robustly actually makes the emergence of opposing extreme right-wing groupings more not less likely.”
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A Prison Service spokesman said there is nobody currently in Frankland’s segregation units who are being protected from Islamic extremists, adding: “These claims are completely untrue.” This was disputed by Wyatt.
New figures published by the ministry on Thursday revealed that the average cost of a prison place in England and Wales rose by 10 per cent last year from £52,000 to £57,000.
Prisons are again operating at near full capacity, with 87,919 inmates as of March 31, leaving just 1,000 spare places.
The MoJ was forced to bring back the emergency use of police cells last month to detain prisoners as some jails in the northwest ran out of room.
The department announced that it had met Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge to hire 1,000 probation officers and had hired an additional 300 on top of the target.
