NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 2- With the imminent threat of penal institutions becoming breeding grounds for radicalization, the Kenya Prison Service (KPS) on Tuesday received a report that will help manage the situation as a preemptive measure.
The report, compiled jointly by KPS and the Legal Resources Foundation Trust, will offer the institution a strategy for preventing and countering radicalization to violent extremism among prisoners, officials said.
Prisons Commissioner-General Wycliffe Ogallo said the report is a major milestone in ensuring penal institutions are not turned into grounds for radicalization to violence.
“The manual strategy seeks to fortify the resilience of actors within prisons in Kenya against the influence of radicalization to violent extremism. It is designed to be used by prison managers and prison staff, in particular, but will also be relevant for other actors involved in the criminal justice system such as policymakers,” the Commissioner-General said when he received the report.
National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) Director Joseph Opondo said “the best practice in developing this manual is to recognize and respond to the bigotry and extremism of these groups. And to treat our confrontation with them as lacking the space to compromise. They cannot live with our freedom and we cannot live with their refusal to respect our freedoms and our lives.”
The report offers detailed risk assessment tools for prison managers and best approaches to housing violent extremist offenders and how to manage them without infringing on their human rights.
Legal Resources Foundation Trust Executive Director Eric Mukoya said any sign of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment can be used by such offenders to advance their violent narrative.
“While penal institutions constitute potential locations for radicalization to violence, in hindsight, they equally provide an opportunity for prisoners to disengage from violence,” he said.
The report calls for demilitarization of how violent extremist offenders are handled, to ensure they not only remain a source of intelligence, but they are also reformed.
But this, the report points out, should be initiated by a proper risk assessment of prisoners, in a bid to inform who poses what level of risk.
“The proper risk assessment of prisoners is one of the fundamental components of good prison management policies. The management of prisoners cannot be successfully undertaken without assessments of the risks they pose,” reads the report.
On housing, the prison managers will have to determine whether to separate violent extremisms offenders from the rest of the prisoners.
According to the report, separating them from the general population could make it easier for authorities to manage and reduce the risk of them radicalizing others to violence, but warns that it poses a threat.
“Separation may elevate their status in the eyes of other prisoners or groups in the prison population, which plays into the narrative of radicalizers, who either feel special or persecuted,” it reads.
Ogallo said prison authorities are set to be trained ahead of the implementation of the report.
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