British extremist prisoners to be housed in special units

LONDON — British authorities said Monday that jailed Islamic extremists would be kept separately from other prisoners in England and Wales.

The move came after a review found evidence of a growing problem with Islamic extremism in prisons and said a coordinated strategy is needed to monitor and stop it. 

Justice Secretary Liz Truss told the BBC that the government was establishing specialist units to hold “a “small number of very subversive individuals.”

She said that prisons "cannot continue" to allow extremists to "pedal poisonous ideology across the mainstream prison population".

Truss told the broadcaster that she accepted the risk that some extremists could become more powerful when kept together, but said authorities must "keep apart those who might collaborate together to create more problems."

The move comes after hate preacher Anjem Choudary was convicted at a court in London in July of inviting support for the Islamic State group. 

Choudary, who told his followers to support the extremist group in broadcasts on YouTube, is due to be sentenced next month.

Peter Dawson, the director of the Prison Reform Trust — a charity that aims to create a just, humane and effective prison system — said in a statement that the goal must be to get people back into the main prison community, “so that changes in their behaviour can be observed."

“Anything else is just storing up an even more difficult problem for when they are eventually released,” he added.