Highest-risk inmates will be moved from one specialist unit to another to prevent collaboration, justice secretary indicates

A new “ghost train” system is to be set up in prisons in England and Wales to move the most troublesome Islamic extremist inmates between isolation units, the justice secretary has indicated.

Liz Truss confirmed that specialist isolation units to hold the highest-risk prisoners would be created in high-security jails. She said the lessons of the Maze and Maghaberry prisons, which became hothouses for terrorists, had been studied.

“We have looked at what happened in Northern Ireland and the experience of other European countries who are facing a growth threat of extremism, as we are in Britain,” Truss said.

A new Ministry of Justice directorate of security, order and counter-terrorism had been set up, she added. It would be responsible for ensuring that concentrating the most dangerous Islamist extremists into separate units would not simply allow them to create their own operational command structures, as happened in Northern Ireland.

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“It will be the responsibility of the head of that directorate, who is a former prison governor, to make sure that we don’t allow prisoners who could potentially collaborate with each other and cause problems,” Truss told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We don’t want to allow that to fester. So people will be moved around and that will be an operational decision by the people who are the experts in dealing with counter-extremism.”

One prison expert called it the “ghost train” approach, in reference to prison slang for the practice of moving the most difficult prisoners from one jail to another. It is also known as the “magic roundabout” or the “shared misery circuit”.

The need to introduce a new system reflects the inherent problems in ending the 50-year-old policy of dispersing the most dangerous prisoners within the mainstream prison population in high-security prisons.

Truss was responding to a classified report on Islamic extremism in jails by Ian Acheson, a former Whitehall civil servant and ex-prison governor. He recently told MPs that the debate over concentration versus dispersal was the most difficult issue his review team had had to grapple with.

In her official response to the review, Truss reveals that five specific extremist “texts” identified by Acheson have been banned from prison libraries. But she does not spell out what criteria have been used to decide which books should be banned. “A thorough and objective process is in place to assess the extremist nature of concerning materials against existing criteria for inappropriate material,” says the official response.

Truss has rejected three of the 11 recommendations made by Acheson in his classified report, of which only an 18-page summary has been published.

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Acheson’s proposal to ban attendance at the Friday prayers inside prisons by those who disrupt or abuse faith activity and to use innovative technology to provide an in-cell alternative has been rejected. The official response says governors can already ban subversive prisoners from Friday prayers and they do not want to “alter the provision of worship more generally or, for example, to pursue in-cell alternatives”.

Truss has also rejected Acheson’s first recommendation calling for an independent advisor on counter-terrorism in prisons, accountable directly to the justice secretary and responsible for an over-arching counter-extremism strategy. It is thought that Acheson himself might have been a candidate for this role, and Truss makes clear she want to use existing expertise “rather than relying on the appointment of a further independent adviser”.

A third recommendation calling for a review of so-called rule 39 correspondence – covering communications between prisoners and their lawyers – is also rejected. The justice ministry says the evidence of the past year is that attempted abuses of this rule have almost always been by prisoners and their criminal associates rather than lawyers.

The Acheson review acknowledged that most of the 240 full-time, part-time and sessional Muslim prison chaplains were dedicated and did good and useful work. It said there was evidence of a weak understanding of Islamist extremists, including a lack of data on conversions and lack of management control over extremist literature and materials.

The review team noted that about two-thirds of Muslim chaplains followed the traditional and conservative Deobandi denomination and said this could be problematic if non-Deobandi chaplains and prisoners felt marginalised. The justice ministry said the “due diligence” tests for recruiting chaplains would be strengthened to “ensure we have the right people in place to counter extremist beliefs”.