Refusing Prevent course should be an offence, says terror expert

A COUNTER-TERRORISM expert who advised ministers on prison extremism has called for failing to co-operate with the Government’s Prevent deradicalistion programme to be made a criminal offence.

Ian Acheson, a former prison governor who advised the Justice Secretary on controlling extremists behind bars, said the scheme had developed a “parish hall mentality” and become “blunted by layers of bureaucracy”.

He said another flaw was a misplaced attempt to equate the far-Right threat with the much greater danger posed by Islamists — saying “the body count doesn’t lie” — and a similarly flawed focus on “safeguarding” those referred to the scheme.

He said the result was that those who posed a serious threat were not being dealt with adequately and that wholesale reform was needed to give deradicalisation a “more muscular security response”.

Mr Acheson said this should include giving national security specialists “driving decision making” about who to focus on and limiting the numbers referred to the scheme to stop it being overwhelmed by “trivial” cases instead of concentrating on committed extremists. He added that legal penalties for refusing to cooperate should be introduced, ending the current voluntary nature of the scheme.

“We must end the notion of voluntary engagement and have criminal penalties in place for non-compliance,” he said in an article for the CapX website.

He added that one reason was that there were “plenty of examples where a commitment to violent extremism is a freely made personal choice” and that treating such people as the products of “environmental causes or victimhood” was a mistake that was leaving dangerous people “sailing past our preventative capabilities”.