The British prison system has long operated on a quiet, liberal hope: that no soul is beyond the reach of the state’s rehabilitative machinery. From the chaplaincy to the classroom, the assumption was that given enough time and “engagement”, the edges of even the most jagged individual could be sanded down.

With Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy’s announcement this week of new, tiered US-style “supermax” units for serious offenders, primarily terrorists, that hope hasn’t just been deferred — it has been dismantled. Following Jonathan Hall KC’s independent review of separation centers last year, the Government has now accepted its 13 recommendations in full. Many suggestions — such as a review of prison staff training, reduction in bureaucracy, and curtailing prisoner abuse of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) regarding conditions in separation units — are no-brainers.

However, “supermaxing” the British prison system doesn’t signify a confident state taking charge. Rather, it is a white flag. It is an expensive, concrete admission that the country’s legal frameworks are too porous, that its de-radicalization programs are too weak, and that its liberal, rehabilitative ideals have finally hit a brick wall.

The logic behind these units is simple: containment. By “ghettoizing” fundamentalists and gang leaders, the Government hopes to stop the “contagion” of radicalization currently rotting the general population of the HMPPS estate. It is a quarantine model of justice.

But while the Government frames this as a proactive solution to the overcrowding crisis, the sums don’t add up. One does not solve a national capacity crisis by building bespoke, high-ratio units for a few dozen people. These units are a resource drain — black holes for the very staff and funding required to make the rest of the prison system functional. Britain is effectively building “boutique” jails for the incurable while the rest of the Victorian-era prison portfolio crumbles under the weight of rising numbers of internments.

The deeper danger, however, is not fiscal but symbolic. By creating a British version of El Salvador’s CECOT (Terrorism Confinement Center), politicians are granting these inmates the one thing they crave most: distinction. In these units, the inmate is no longer a petty thug or a confused zealot; he is an enemy of the state, a “warrior” deemed so dangerous that the ordinary rules of British justice no longer apply. This celebrity status is a recruitment goldmine. The UK risks creating a hierarchy in which the highest honor for a radical is to get “banged up” in the supermax.

There is also an uncomfortable practical reality to consider. When one concentrates the most radicalized and violent elements of a population into a single penitentiary pressure cooker, the physics of the prison environment change. Recent history suggests that by the time this program is fully realized, there could be a “spectacular” event inside — be it a high-profile riot, staff taken as hostages, or worse.

Ultimately, the supermax is a symptom of a state which no longer believes in its own power to transform. Labour’s shift toward these units suggests a government that has looked at the country’s human rights frameworks and decided that, rather than fixing the law, it is easier to simply thicken the walls.

Britain is building monuments to its own inability to integrate, to reform, and to govern. The supermax may keep the contagion at bay for a season, but it does so by confirming the very narrative the extremists have been pushing all along: might is right, and namby-pamby liberalism is for suckers.

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David Matthews is an award-winning writer.

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