Analysis Questions over Separation Centres for Extremists

With its high, ugly, grey concrete perimeter walls, HMP Frankland looks as grim from the outside as you would expect for a place nicknamed, rightly or wrongly, Monster Mansion.

- Mark Brown

Since it was opened in 1983 on the leafy outskirts of Durham - near a 13th-century priory used for centuries as a holiday retreat for Benedictine monks - its inmates have included Peter Sutcliffe, Harold Shipman and Charles Bronson.

It is not the sort of place to ever get favourable reviews.

Bronson, one of the UK's longest-serving prisoners, wrote in his autobiography: "It was too intense, too closed in and claustrophobic."

Frankland is in the news because of an attack on prison guards by Hashem Abedi, a terrorist involved in the Manchester arena bombing serving at least 55 years.

Some of the current inmates at Frankland include the Soham murderer Ian Huntley, the serial killer Levi Bellfield, the Soho nailbomber David Copeland and Wayne Couzens, the Metropolitan police officer who raped and murdered Sarah Everard in 2021.

Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president sentenced to 50 years for war crimes, is reportedly another Frankland prisoner. Ex-prisoners say someone engraved: "Welcome to hell" inside the holding cell at the prison's reception.

Inside the category A maximum-security jail with more than 800 inmates, it is all fences and gates and keys, say people who know it.

And inside all of that, on a narrow corridor, is a separation centre where the attack took place.