LONDON: Muslim prisoners in England are more frequently subjected to painful restraining techniques at the hands of prison staff compared with other inmates, new data shows.
In eight out of nine prisons with high Muslim populations, Muslim men are more frequently targeted with batons, made to wear rigid bar handcuffs, or are held in painful positions, according to data obtained by freedom of information requests.
Maslaha, a social justice charity, requested the information from the nine prisons, The Guardian reported.
It comes amid calls for a crackdown on Muslim gangs in British prisons. The data received by Maslaha covers 2023, the latest full year available.
In London’s Belmarsh prison, which often holds terrorist suspects, Muslim prisoners made up 32 percent of the population in 2023.
However, that year, Muslim men in Belmarsh were subjected to 43 percent of incidents involving the use of rigid bar handcuffs and 61 percent of instances relating to pain-inducing techniques.
Similar disparities were recorded in Cambridgeshire’s HMP Whitemoor, London’s HMP Isis and HMP/YOI Feltham B, as well as HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes.
Just one of the nine prisons included in the data, HMP The Mount, recorded a use of force against Muslim prisoners lower than for the overall population.
Maslaha’s director, Raheel Mohammed, said that the disparities “lay bare the realities of life” for Muslims in British prisons.
He added that Muslims were “being targeted by the use of force, subjected to dangerous, pain-inducing techniques and singled out for deliberately humiliating treatment.”
Separate data from the Ministry of Justice, for September last year, showed that there were 15,594 Muslim prisoners in England and Wales. They accounted for 18 percent of all prison inmates.
In response to the statistics concerning the use of force, Mark Fairhurst, the national chair of the Prison Officers’ Association, said: “Staff only use force at the last resort when necessary and when it is used, it is always proportionate and reasonable.”
Last year, HM Prison & Probation Service launched a national initiative to tackle racial disproportionality in the use of force.
It included measuring disparities in treatment between prisoners of different ethnic groups and religions.
A Prison Service spokesperson said: “We recognize the use of force in prisons needs greater supervision and have already introduced mechanisms to reduce the disparities in how it is used.
“Our new race disparity unit will help tackle racial discrimination further.”
