International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 122

The Release of Jihadists from Prison: Unanswered Questions from the 2000s
Preventive Detention
Constitutional concerns and the ratification of a number of international treaties
prevent us from using preventive detention for radicalized individuals when their
prison sentences come to an end. There are also several reasons to doubt the effectiveness
of such a measure.
In order to determine the degree of danger posed by each freed prisoner,
their profiles are assessed. This task is carried out by a judicial officer who, in
the absence of formal proof of their threat, would never dare to apply preventive
detention. We already know the practical limitations we are up against from our
experience with minimum sentences. Sold as a response to the challenge of petty
crime and delinquency, they have been barely used by magistrates, who are sometimes
reluctant to pronounce custodial sentences. However, the biggest problem
is a legal system and a prison system that are on their last legs. It is difficult for the
courts to incarcerate people—even with the necessary legal changes—when the
government has not created enough prison places.
Another issue that should not be forgotten relating to the assessment of
prisoner profiles is that these individuals can go from bad to worse very quickly.
The practice of dissimulation and the inadequacy of the profiles make the evaluation
process very uncertain and unreliable over time. Inevitably, mistakes will be
made. Nobody is suggesting that imprisoning people without reference to a specific
offense could be a viable long-term solution. A return to the days of “lettres de
cachet” (royal prerogative) is unlikely any time soon.
Surveillance
On the question of tracking jihadists after their release, the French Minister of
Justice has set her colleague at the Ministry of the Interior an impossible challenge.
The prison intelligence service is simply required to hand a kind of “delivery note”
to their counterparts at the DGSI (General Directorate for Internal Security), who
are then responsible for finding 500 officers every year to follow the twenty jihadists
released over the same time frame, and all set against the backdrop of a two
trillion euro national debt ...
In addition to the logistical issues, the surveillance of these individuals runs
into a number of practical problems: the volume of work, the simplicity of the
modus operandi, and the surveillance techniques used.
• Volume of Work
Creating a priority ranking scale to enable the police to follow only those referred
to in the press as “masterminds” is fanciful. Not even in North Korea can
the intelligence services read people’s minds. Human nature is unpredictable,
all the more so in the case of radicalized individuals who, in most cases, are
highly suggestible.
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