Are prisons really schools for terrorism? Challenging the rhetoric on prison radicalization

When governments justify the necessity to segregate and/or isolate terrorist inmates from mainstream prisoners, they commonly raise concerns about their prisons becoming schools for terrorism. Yet, these concerns are often based on limited information about prisoner radicalization, potentially resulting in the mismanagement (both financially and psychologically) of terrorist inmates in many countries. This article challenges contemporary research on prison radicalization and recruitment by highlighting several factors that may hamper these activities to demonstrate why some prison regimes and their programmes for housing terrorist inmates face a greater risk than others. In contrast to other studies, this article concludes that the radicalization and recruitment of mainstream prisoners by terrorist inmates under certain prison conditions is not necessarily a given outcome.