Terrorists or freedom fighters?

There has been, in recent years, an influx of prisoners sentenced under the Terrorism Act 2006. This has presented a problem for those working in sentence management and planning within the prison service; in short, in a situation that mirrors that of early IPP sentenced prisoners, offenders have been arriving in prisons that don't know what to do with them. Such importance is placed on the completion of rehabilitative work that the lack of programmes tailored to extremist offenders is causing problems both in progressing them through the prison system and in reducing their future risk. Practitioners who work in prison law or with extremists should be aware of recent proposals from the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which aims to show how they will tackle this problem.

NOMS's extremism team have laid out their proposals in a recent article '“ 'Intervening with Extremist Offenders' (Forensic Update Issue 105, January 2012). The authors, Monica Lloyd and Christopher Dean, provide details of how extremist offenders sentenced under the Terrorism Act will be dealt with by NOMS during the course of their sentence. This response briefly examines NOMS' proposals for psychological engagement with extremist offenders whose behaviour is often linked to external political or ideological factors.

Psychological engagement has not always been utilised with those classed as terrorists. As the authors note, those convicted of offences related to Irish Republican extremism in the 1970s were allowed to organise themselves as prisoners of war by the Northern Ireland Prison Service. There was recognition that such prisoners were not 'normal' offenders but had committed their offences in a political context that precluded conventional sentence management. The recent publication from NOMS takes a different approach, reversing the position of giving extremist offenders a special status, and curtailing the recognition of external factors as a motivation for ?their behaviour.

Avoiding subjectivity

Although, according to Levitt ('Is Terrorism Worth Defining?' 1986), 'the search for a legal definition of terrorism in some ways resembles the quest for the Holy Grail', NOMS must have some definition of extremism if it is to identify and work with extremists. However, it is hardly controversial to say that a definition of extremism depends upon one's point of view. As the authors note: 'One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter,' and sometimes, as with Afghan Islamists, a group can be first one then the other as political circumstances change. The authors also, and correctly, highlight the importance of not pathologising the use of violence per se. However, having correctly identified the potential trap of subjectivity, they proceed to march straight into it with their definition of extremism as: 'Any offence committed in association with a group, cause or ideology that propagates extremist views and actions and justifies the use of violence and other illegal conduct in pursuit of its objectives.'

NOMS' definition of extremism is not derived from statute and there is concern among some practitioners that it is seeking to cast its net wider than those sentenced under the Terrorism Act. There is a danger that such definitions of extremism are merely ways of dealing with views that those in power disapprove of, whether they relate to religion, animal rights or the environment. The offender profile (see box) usefully highlights the subjectivity of extremism '“ 'X' is otherwise known as Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.

Far more troubling than the definition of extremism, is the focus by NOMS on extremism as a product of psychology, rather than a complex mix of factors. The article states that individual assessment will identify the personal motivation for the offender's involvement in extremism and later describes such motivation as centring on 'issues of identity, status and esteem'. Such issues are no doubt important, but it is surely a mistake to try and de-contextualise extremism in this way; to address the personal without the political. As Martha Crenshaw notes in 'Terrorism in Context' (2007), 'the phenom-enon of terrorism'¦ depends on historical context '“ political, social, and economic'. A report by the Federal Research Division of the US Library of Congress (Rex A. Hudson, 1999) concurs: 'Terrorism usually results from multiple causal factors '“ not only psychological, but also economic, political, religious and sociological factors.'

Personal motives

Depriving offenders of intervention that recognises external factors risks distorting both the offence and the offender. Consider the actions of Nelson Mandela or the French Resistance without an understanding of the political background in which they operated. Indeed, the whole point of extremist offences is that they are unlike other offences precisely because of the context in which they are committed and the underlying ideology that influences the offender's actions. So, there is a risk that a psychological approach that de-contextualises an offender will fail to appreciate underlying motives and ignore how interlinked motives and actions can be. In the case of Bilal Abdullah, the 'Glasgow bomber', or the four offenders involved in the Animal Liberation Front's campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences, the offen-ces committed were inextricably linked to political or religious views, and it is hard to imagine dealing with the offence without confronting these views.

There is nothing wrong with examining personal motives for joining extremist organisations, but the approach of NOMS is worrying in the categories of offenders it identifies. The article recognises two basic types of personal motivation for extremists:

1. 'Those who have failed to achieve an identity or role that affords them the status they believe they deserve or who have experienced a recent setback.'

2. 'Those who have the capability and willingness to use violence [and who] may be dominant, bullying, self-promoting.'

This 'either/or' dualism seems almost ridic-ulously limited in its approach. Practitioners working with extremist offenders may find it difficult to reconcile their experience of their clients with the options offered above. A review of the psychological literature on terrorism (Psychology of Terrorism, 2003), lead by Randy Borum of the University of South Florida, found widely disparate conclusions as to the psychology of extremist offenders, from 'psychologically healthy individuals' (Clark, 1983 '“ a study of ETA), to 'political terrorists are sociopaths' (cited in Corrado, 1981).

Where the literature offers such extreme alternatives, NOMS limits itself, and potentially the quality of its intervention, by its simplistic approach to personal motivation. The offender profile examined above sits uneasily in a conceptual framework that can only, to put it bluntly, consider extremists as underachievers or bullies.

Psychological interpretation

The concern over vested interests is interlinked with concerns regarding NOMS' definition of extremism. As one colleague remarked to me '“ 'who are they to say what is and is not extreme?' There is a concern among some solicitors that the influence of psychologists within NOMS makes it impossible to consider how to deal with extremists other than in terms of psychological responses

To say that psychologists have a vested interest in creating more work for psych-ologists prompts charges of cynicism, but it is important to separate the concepts of vested interest and motivation. The authors of the article have been asked to look at extremism in psychological terms. The motivation is clear and explicit; the psychological answer a necessary result of the question. However, in more general terms, psychologists may have a vested interest in maintaining their influence on policy and in creating work for other psychologists. That is not to say that this is their motivation, rather it is to introduce a note of caution into accepting that a response to extremist offenders must necessarily be psychological.

There is little doubt that prison psychologists, working in difficult conditions and with a lack of resources, can achieve good things in addressing much offending behaviour. It is, however, questionable whether this approach is entirely suitable with extremist offenders (who might formerly have been considered political prisoners), and whether this approach will be successful without a full consideration of offenders' politics or ideology.

Mention in the NOMS article is made of the Al Furqan programme, which seems to buck the trend by engaging with the religious aspects of extremist behaviour. Here too, however, some solicitors are concerned that the programme seems to desire to re-educate, 'to correct misinterpretations of the Quran', rather than to engage with the views and ideas of offenders on equal terms.

The problem with NOMS's approach to extremist offenders stems from the difficulties in producing a cast-iron definition of extremism. When a definition of extremism is subjective, as NOMS's arguably is, there is a danger that ideologies of which one disapproves will be classed as extremist and that there will be a sort of 'mission-creep' in the views classed as extremist. Arguably, this is evident from the article, which begins by talking about the Terrorism Act 2006 and goes on to include offenders concerned with 'extreme right-wing ideology, environ-mentalism, animal rights or other single issues'.

This problem is compounded by NOMS's tendency to look for psychological answers to all offending behaviour and to isolate or ignore the interrelation between offending behaviour and group ideology or politics. This not only ignores what may or may not be valid ideological concerns, but risks undermining the success of any intervention by failing to deal holistically with extremist offending behaviour as a product of myriad factors, both personal and political.

There may be good psychological work to be done with extremists, but NOMS has yet to make its case that the psychological approach should be the main way of dealing with such offenders. Further articles are planned by the NOMS extremism team, and these should flesh out their approach as well as providing more bibliographical detail '“ so far, two of the three sources cited by the team are focused on right-wing extremists. Solicitors who work with offenders whose behaviour could be classed as extremist should pay careful attention to further developments in this area.