April 30 2025 - 4:45pm
There is no question that Britain’s prisons are becoming more violent. Figures published last week show assaults on staff and prisoners at record levels. The Muslim charity Maslaha has claimed that force used by prison staff to quell the rising tide is fuelled by “Islamophobia” and is a result of the racialized policing of the landings across eight of the nine prisons it surveyed. Is this an accurate or fair representation of the problem?
In a word: no. First, there’s the question of context. Prison assaults are overwhelmingly committed by prisoners on other inmates. In the last 12 months, there have been over 20,000 such assaults — roughly twice as many as the number of assaults on staff. Violence is endemic in prisons and staff have a duty to intervene when inmates are being attacked by others, as well as using force to protect themselves.
Meanwhile, frontline officers are reeling after a violent attack on three colleagues just before Easter by Hashem Abedi, a prisoner who plotted the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. Eye-watering sickness absence rates from stress and acute recruitment and retention problems tell their own story. This is not a safe environment to work in.
To manage this onslaught, officers — with the same powers on duty as police constables — are trained to use physical control and restraint. They are equipped with rigid bar cuffs, batons and, in some prisons, incapacitant spray. Maslaha has used Freedom of Information requests to compare use-of-force data across a range of prisons with significant Muslim populations to assert that the disproportionality evident is racist.
At 18% of the total headcount, Muslims are significantly overrepresented in the UK’s disordered prison system relative to their share of the general population (6.5%). This is a fact which should detain criminologists and policymakers, but it is not proven in this analysis that disproportionality is discrimination.
In some of Britain’s high-security prisons, holding the most dangerous offenders, Muslims born in the faith or who convert for safety or power comprise between one third and almost half the population, so this disparity is significantly reduced. In addition, there is well-documented evidence of coercive behavior by Muslim gangs, admitted both by the prison service in its own research and in the findings of the Government’s independent watchdog on terrorism legislation. A picture therefore emerges that provides at least a counter-narrative to the emotional reasoning present in the Maslaha report.
The charity’s approach to this data constitutes a conclusion in search of evidence. When it considers the use of physical restraint and incapacitant spray, it talks up the exceptionally rare severe effects of using either type of force and talks down the distinction between drawing and using spray. Often, the demonstration of a willingness to use force by prison staff in dangerous situations is enough to cause prisoners to back off and for order to be regained. There is no control for the many situational or behavioral variables that impact the use of force by officers. A crude aggregation of the incidents versus population excludes where force is used preemptively, defensively, or as an intervention to rescue prisoners under attack. No data is offered on the ethnicity of officers involved, either.
There are no doubt some racist officers on the front lines of prisons, as there are racist people in all walks of life. But this piece of research is so clouded by partiality that it cannot be taken seriously. It certainly won’t contribute to once again making British prisons ordered and controlled places where all are safe regardless of religion or ethnicity, and where rehabilitation is a reality. The real problem here is an environment in our most challenging prisons where the state is not in charge and broken officers, traduced and targeted for asserting any authority, leave in droves.
Ian Acheson is a former prison governor and author of Screwed: Britain’s Prison Crisis and How To Escape it.
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