国际英语新闻:Plans for "terrorist prison" would only "breed terrorism": Australian experts

CANBERRA, June 10 (Xinhua) -- Terror experts in Australia on Saturday raised concerns that plans for a new, high-security prison specifically for those convicted on terror charges would only "breed terrorism."

After meeting in Hobart for the latest Coalition of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting, some of Australia's state and territory leaders floated the idea of a new "supermax" prison to be built specifically to house those found guilty of terror-related charges.

It comes less than a week after a man with links to terror was let out on parole in Melbourne just months before he killed a man and injured three police officers in an Islamic State-claimed terror siege, prompting calls from the prime minister to keep at-risk terror suspects locked up after their sentence has expired.

But the plan for a specially-designed terror prison have come under fire from national security and terror experts. Dr Clark Jones from the Australian National University (ANU) told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Saturday that housing the most dangerous terror suspects in one place would only "breed terrorism."

"History has shown us that when you incarcerate terrorist offenders, and I'm talking about the experience the UK had with the IRA, I think it breeds terrorism," Jones said.

"It doesn't change someone's thinking. It doesn't create any sorts of positive relationships around inmates. I think it tends to exasperate their feeling of isolation and it creates more of a militant facility."

Meanwhile former Scotland Yard terror expert Nick O'Brien told the ABC that locked up foreign fighters who return home aren't going to be rehabilitated into losing their terrorist ideologies.

"People can be coming back from basically what is a war zone. They would have been given training and they're going to be of the mindset that they're going to, or some of them anyway, are going to want to carry out acts of terrorism," O'Brien said on Saturday.

After the COAG meetings in Hobart, Victoria's Premier Daniel Andrews floated the idea of a "fit-for-purpose" terror-only prison.

"Perhaps a fit-for-purpose, centralized prison where all of these offenders can be properly jailed and where we can have one policy, one focus, on what is a very big threat to every single one of us," Andrews said on Friday.