European Prisons Fueling Spread of Islamic Radicalism Convicted terrorists sit atop the social pecking order in many facilities, using jail time to plot new attacks or groom petty criminals for jihad By Noemie Bisserbe

Posted By on August 1st, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/european-prisons-fueling-spread-of-islamic-radicalism-1470001491

PARIS—After his capture in Belgium, the Paris terror suspect Salah Abdeslam was transferred to a prison cell in France where the paint on the walls was still fresh.

Prison staff had spent three weeks renovating the space, bolting down furniture and installing video cameras to make sure the 26-year-old’s solitary confinement went smoothly, said Marcel Duredon, a guard at Fleury-Mérogis, the high-security facility on the outskirts of Paris.

Still, the measures did little to calm the ruckus that erupted in the cell blocks as dusk fell and word spread about the prison’s newest inmate, the last surviving suspect in the Nov. 13 attacks.

“Some welcomed him as the messiah,” Mr. Duredon said.

The rise of Islamic State has caught Europe’s prison systems flat-footed. Convicted terrorists, some of whom serve prison terms as brief as two years, sit atop the social pecking order in facilities like Fleury-Mérogis.

Many use jail time to forge ties with petty criminals from the predominantly Muslim suburbs that ring European cities, authorities say, grooming them for jihad missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria—or attacks at home.

Now the return over the past year of an unprecedented number of jihadists from Islamic State territory is placing European prisons in an even bigger bind. To keep militants off the streets, authorities are throwing many of them in jail, but that is injecting battle-hardened radicals into overcrowded prisons. Researchers estimate that 50% to 60% of the roughly 67,000 inmates in the French prison system are Muslims, who represent just 7.5% of the general population.

Prison officials are also faced with a difficult choice between absorbing hardened militants into the general prison population, where they might radicalize others, or to concentrate them in special wards where they may be better able to hatch plots.

“We’re sitting on a time bomb,” says Adeline Hazan, who heads a state agency tasked with auditing French prisons. CONTINUE AT SITE

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