Why are petty criminals becoming hardened terrorists?

You read that right. According to recent research, British prisons work as effective terrorism training camps.

The reason: several terrorism suspects are cooped up together, and use the opportunity to share their opinions and radicalize other prisoners into terrorism.

In fact, many of the terror attacks carried out in recent times across Europe are proof of this. Most of the mastermind terrorists who designed these attacks had spent time in jail as petty criminals. Later, they turned into radicalized, motivated terrorists.

What is the solution to this problem?

The solution to this challenge, according to officials, is to isolate known jihadist prisoners from others. Since research has proved that radicalization is a serious problem in UK prisons, officials are considering following this arrangement. UK’s Justice Secretary Liz Truss said, “We cannot have a situation where we have extremist prisoners influencing others who are vulnerable to those messages.”

Prisoners share their experiences about this issue:

One former prisoner told Fox News in 2014 about what he witnessed. He claimed that when the news about Mosul being captured by ISIS was revealed, the high-security prison echoed with prisoners’ chants of “Allahu Akbar.” He said, “It was like a big party that went on unchecked for several hours.”

Here are interesting opinions shared on Twitter:

This issue is urgent, since it means that arresting and imprisoning terrorists is not only insufficient, but it is actually contributing to more radicalization. It is important to ensure that those with fanatic or violent ideas do not influence other, mentally vulnerable prisoners.

For now, isolating prisoners with known jihadist beliefs is the most effective solution.

Image credit: Rick, Flickr.