UMP deputy Guillaume Larrivé wrote a report “for an action plan of Islamist anti-radicalization in prison,” from which excerpts have been published in the Figaro.
“Islamist radicalization is now likely to involve several hundred prisoners,” the report estimates. This number has resulted in an investigation in five prisons throughout France. “While about 60% of the French prison system, that is 40,000 inmates, can be considered Muslim…there are among them radicalized individuals or those who are in the process of radicalization” the report estimates. Five recommendations from this report will be submitted to congress.
The first recommendation is to strengthen and expand the intelligence teams in French prisons. Larrivé points to the lack of precise numbers, but according to him there are 13 intelligence officers for 189 prisons and 68,000 prisoners. He hopes to add individual intelligence officers in each prison “to better target, to better identity prisoners.”
The second recommendation is to anticipate the return of jihadists in order to avoid “a French Guantanamo.” There are currently 53 people who have fought in Iraq and Syria that are incarcerated in France. Larrivé wants to “anticipate the evolution of this phenomenon” and hopes to create “reserved [prison] segments with psychological support…There we would have the fanatics, who sometimes have previous psychological and psychiatric records,” he writes.
He would also like to place imams in certain prisons to “diffuse Islamist propaganda” and wants to “limit exchanges with the outside world.” To accomplish this, Larrivé wants to institute stop-and-frisk searches of those entering the prison and hopes to block non-authorized cell phones.
Larrivé’s last recommendation is to undo the Taubira law, which regulates the prison system’s budget and “in reality…favors an approach of social treatment of prisoners outside the prison walls.”
