Radicalization in Prison: The French Case

Abstract

This article purports to show the change in the pattern of radicalization in French prisons over the last decade. Contrary to the extrovert model of radicalization in place up to the beginning years of the twenty-first century where a dozen people could be involved, the new one is introverted, based on very few individuals (mostly two or three people), and in contrast to the previous network in which people with psychological troubles were marginalized, psychopaths or psychically disturbed people can now play a major role. Whereas the extrovert model was easy to detect according to a profiling based on features like long beards, overt proselytizing, aggressive attitudes towards authorities and fundamentalist behaviour models, the new attitude avoids all those features and people exposed to radicalization have internalized the non-visible conduct pattern in order not to attract the attention of the authorities. The article explores some new attitudes resulting in radicalization and the major stumbling-blocks encountered by prison authorities in their attempts to unearth them.

Notes

¹This judicial category was created in 1996 by an act of the French parliament and defined as equivalent to an actual terrorist act. It allows provisional detention of suspects.

²See Randy Borum, ‘Radicalization into Violent Extremism I: A Review of Social Science Theories’, Journal of Strategic Security, 4:4. (2011), pp. 7–35. Alexandre Wilner and Claire-Jehanne Dubouloz, ‘Homegrown Terrorism and Transformative Learning: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Radicalization’, Global Change, Peace, and Security, 22:1 (2010), pp. 1–26.

³See, ‘Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat’, The New York Police Department Intelligence Division, 2007, in relation to the Islamic extremist radicalization; Clark McCauley and Sophia Mosalenko, ‘Mechanisms of Political Radicalization: Pathways Towards Terrorism’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 20:3 (2008), pp. 425–433.

⁴See for a summary of radicalization theories, regarding especially Islamic extremism, Farhad Khosrokhavar, Inside Jihadism (London and Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009), especially ch. 1 ‘Explanatory Approaches to Jihadism’.

⁵See Martin Crenshaw, ‘Political Explanations’, in Addressing the Causes of Terrorism, Madrid, The Club of Madrid Series on Democracy and Terrorism, Vol. 1, 2005, pp. 13–18.

⁶See Donatella Della Porta, ‘Research Design and Methodological Considerations’ in Donatella Della Porta and Claudius Wagemann (ed.) Patterns of Radicalization in Political Activism: Research Design (Veto Project Report, Florence: EUI, 2005).

⁷See Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke, ‘The Quantitative Analysis of Terrorism and Immigration: An Initial Exploration’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 18:4 (2006) pp. 479–494.

⁸See Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-first Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

⁹See Ami Pedahzur who proposes a three-stage model, ‘Toward an Analytical Model of Suicide Terrorism – A Comment’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 16:4 (October/December 2004), pp. 841–844.

¹⁰See Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 2003).

¹¹Rick Coolsaet finds that within immigrant Muslim communities in Europe rigid interpretations of Islam (mainly by the organizations like Tabligh and Salafists) gives a clue to their sympathy for radical interpretations of Islam. See R. Coolsaet, Radicalisation and Europe's Counter-terrorism Strategy, Royal Institute for International Relations (Brussels) and Ghent University, The Transatlantic Dialogue on Terrorism CSIS/Clingendael The Hague, 2005.

¹²See Diego Gambetta (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

¹³See Clark McCauley and Sofia Mosalenko, Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The authors define pathways of radicalization in relation to the personal grievances, group grievance and what they call the ‘slippery slope’, namely the gradual radicalization through activities restricting the individual's social relations, and factors as love, heroism through high risk, conferring a high status on those who are reckless.

¹⁴See Prisons and Terrorism, Radicalisation and De-radicalisation in 15 Countries, The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, 19 August 2010, http://icsr.info/2010/08/prisons-and-terrorism-radicalisation-and-de-radicalisation-in-15-countries/.

¹⁵See Jean-Luc Marret, Radicalisations et recrutements de l'islam radical dans l'Union européenne: L'exemple des prison, Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, 14 January 2006, http://www.frstrategie.org/barreFRS/publications/notes/20060114.pdf. James Brandon, ‘The Danger of Prison Radicalization in the West’, CTC Sentinel, 2:12 (December 2009), pp.1–4.

¹⁶In my earlier writings I tried to understand radicalization from below in the sense of personal, individual indoctrination in economically secluded areas (France's poor suburbs) or through identity problems in hyper-secular European societies. See Farhad Khosrokhavar, L'islam en prison (Paris: Editions Balland, 2004); Quand Al Qaeda parle: Témoignage derrière les barreaux (Paris: Editions Grasset, 2005). In this article, ‘radicalization from below’ refers to radicalization within the specific context of prisons.

¹⁷John Fighel, ‘The Radicalization Process in Prisons’, International Institute for Counterterrorism, presented at NATO workshop, Eliat, 25 December 2007.

¹⁸Pascale Combelles Siegel, ‘Radical Islam and the French Muslim Prison Population’, Terrorism Monitor, The Jamestown Foundation, 4:15, 27 July 2006; Peter King, ‘The Threat of Muslim Radicalization in US Prisons’, 15 June 2011, http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/16.

¹⁹‘Prison Radicalization and How It Happens: An Analysis into Root Causes of Terrorism’, Noor Huda Ismail, Jakarta, Opinion, 27 August 2010, www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/08/27/prison-radica…; Mark S. Hamm, ‘Prisoner Radicalization: Assessing the Threat in US Correctional Institutions’, NIJ Journal, 261, pp. 14–19. National Institute of Justice (Washington, DC) 2008 [the case of Kevin Lamar], http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/224085.pdf.

²⁰Mark S. Hamm, ‘Locking Up Terrorists: Three Models for Controlling Prisoner Radicalization’, 2011, www.indstate.edu/.../July%20Cornerston…

²¹For a discussion of the specificities and tensions of French secularism, please see Doyle pp. 265–283 and André and Harris-Hogan pp. 307–319 (both this issue).

²²See Khosrokhavar, L'islam en prison.

²³The literature on Islamic radicals is replete with the observation about the ‘normalcy’ of the overwhelming majority of Islamic radicals. See the works of Diego Gambetta, Marc Sageman, and Robert Leiken, among others.

²⁴Due to space constraints, this paper cannot deal with those features promoting or furthering radicalization to do with the specific architecture of the prison.

²⁵There are in France no official statistics of Muslims in prison because it is illegal to officially register someone's religion. As my own research and other estimates (like Jean-Marie Delarue, ‘Islam en Prison’, Journal officiel, 17 April 2012) have shown, around half of some 64,787 prisoners in France (www.justice.gouv.fr/prison-et-reinsertion-10036/les-chiffres-clefs-10041/) are Muslims (not necessarily practising Muslims, but those who consider themselves as such) (see ‘Les chiffres clés de l'administration pénitentiaire’, January 2012). According to Delarue, those who fast during the month of Ramadan are around 40 per cent of the prisoners. Many Muslims in prison do not state their dietary preferences or even take the meals provided by the jail because they cook for themselves.

²⁶In 2012 there were 655 Catholic, 70 Jewish and only 151 Muslim chaplains in French prisons (see ‘Les chiffres clés de l'administration pénitentiaire au 1er janvier 2012’, Direction de l'administration pénitentiaire, at the website given in note 25 above). Since the number of Muslims is most probably at least as high as that of Catholics, the disproportion is blatant: less than one Muslim for four Catholic ministers.

²⁷See James Beckford, Danièle Joly and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Muslims in Prison: Challenge and Change in Britain and France (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

²⁸In my inquiry into the conditions of Muslims in French prisons between the years 2000 and 2003, I found that in many prisons halal food was simply not available, even at the private ‘cantine’. See my Islam en prison, op. cit.

²⁹See Delarue, ‘Islam en Prison’.

³⁰See http://prisons.free.fr/.

³¹See ‘Les chiffres clés de l'administration pénitentiaire au 1er janvier 2012’, op. cit.

³²See Enquête INSERM sur la période 2005-2010.

³³There are 655 Catholic, 70 Jewish, 151 Muslim, 24 Orthodox, 317 Protestant and 32 other ministers in French prisons. With a rate commensurable with that for other religions, there would be somewhere between four to five times more Muslim chaplains than currently. See ‘Les chiffres clés’, op. cit.

³⁴For obvious reasons, exact figures cannot be provided for intelligence officers in prisons. The fact remains that many on the spot complain about understaffing. In some prisons, although legally able to move from one section to the other, they are restricted in their intelligence gathering by some deputy directors who hold on fiercely to their privileges (for instance by asking the local intelligence gathering officer in their units to submit their findings only to give back to the intelligence officers only the parts deemed deliverable).

³⁵These numbers were collected during the interviews with the prison staff and not all of them are publicly available.

³⁶Jihadists are sometimes called Jihadi Salafists in distinction to the Sheikhi Salafists. The latter are discussed below.

³⁷The Algerian FIS (Front Islamique de Salut) was outlawed in Algeria in 1992 and was transformed into the GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé). In July 1995, Sheikh Abdelbaki Sahraoui was killed in Paris as well as one of his close collaborators in the Myrha Mosque in Paris. The attacks of the Paris underground on 25 July 1995, at the Saint-Michel Station, claimed eight dead and 117 wounded. Since then, up until Mohamed Merah's attacks of March 2012 (he was killed by security forces on 22 March 2012) French security forces had successfully prevented all terrorist attacks in France.

³⁸The definition of Islamic fundamentalism by French authorities (sometimes called intégrisme musulman), is mainly based on external signs: long beard, donning of djellabas, wearing of short trousers, and for women, of the hijab. Statements and all those behaviour patterns putting into question the notion of laïcité are taken as signs of fundamentalism. The Salafis (and outside prison, members of the Tablighi Jamaat and sometimes even those who refuse to tightly separate faith as private and public life), are thus characterized as fundamentalists.

³⁹In some prisons there are no collective Friday prayers; instead, only weekly religious groups under the guidance of the official Muslim chaplain and not necessarily on Fridays.

⁴⁰See Abu Mus'ab al Suri, Da'wa al muqawama al alamiya [Call for a Worldwide Islamic Resistance], Minbar al Tawhid wal Jihad, probably around 2002–2003. For a discussion of this aspect of his thought, see my Inside Jihadism, op. cit., p. 245, and passim.

⁴¹The duo, trio, self-radicalized and rebellious are conceptualizations based on my observations in prisons.

⁴²In this study we lack adequate psychological concepts to define these two types. It remains that the two types are dissimilar as to the personalities involved. In the first case the radicalizer is ‘normal’ and the radicalized, psychologically disturbed. In the second, the radicalizer is psychologically disturbed (a type of ‘perverse’ psychopath) and the radicalized, ‘normal’, but rather passive or docile.

⁴³See Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad, op. cit.

⁴⁴One could interpret the case of Zacaria Moussaoui, the French citizen of Moroccan origin, sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006, in this light. He was supposed to be part of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US but was not perhaps taken seriously enough by the group, in spite of the fact that he was alleged to have been a replacement for the ‘first’ twentieth hijacker. See for his role in the 9/11 attacks The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004).

⁴⁵Due to our sociological ethics, we did not mention them specifically, by their names, to the authorities.

⁴⁶See André and Harris-Hogan's case study, pp. 307–319 (this issue).

⁴⁷Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, can be said to have embodied this type of individual. He killed a total of 77 people and maimed 151. He did not spend any time in prison before his crime but some individuals with neo-Nazi credentials in prison show signs of similar readiness to engage in violent action in the name of white supremacy.

⁴⁸Among his declarations during the interview: ‘Once out, I'll show them how capable I am! [de quel bois je me chauffe!]. Some people like Merah [the French terrorist of Algerian origin who killed seven people and injured six others before being put to death by the security forces] might find me good enough for their company! I could teach them a violent lesson, they are suppressing the Muslims and as some people say, Jihad might be an appropriate response’. I assured him that his name would not be revealed to anyone (I kept the quotes anonymous in keeping with the ethics of scholarly research). His statements might be interpreted as an expression of anger, but they might also be understood as a resolve that might be followed by violent action.

⁴⁹One finds some examples of this type of radicalized Black people in my book Quand Al Qaeda parle, op. cit.

⁵⁰See Samir Amghar, Le Salafisme aujourd'hui (Paris: Michalon Publishers, 2011); Patrick Haenni, L'islam de marché: L'autre révolution conservatrice (Paris: Seuil Publishers, 2008); Natalie J. Doyle, ‘Lessons from France: Popularist Anxiety and Veiled Fears of Islam’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 22:4 (2011), pp. 475–489.