Jane Austen (Image: Encyclopaedia Britannica)

This week, a judge in Lincolnshire took a novel approach to countering a budding white supremacist by sentencing him to… the magic of reading.

Ben John, a 21-year-old Nazi sympathiser long identified as a terror risk, who had been writing anti-immigrant and homophobic letters before graduating to downloading instructions on how to build a bomb, was found guilty in August of possessing material likely to be useful for preparing an act of terror. The charge carries with it a potential 15-year prison sentence.

John missed out on jail time “by the skin of his teeth”. Instead, he’s been set homework of reading the great English canon — swapping out white-supremacist literature for the work of Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.

“An approach like this doesn’t come from any formal deradicalisation framework, except perhaps if the texts contain ideas that might change someone’s perspective,” Dr Clarke Jones of the Australian Intervention Support Hub at Australian National University told Crikey.

“So I’m in two minds — on the one hand, is there any evidence that this will be effective? On the other, hats off to the judge for looking for alternatives to prison time; once a young offender is the criminal justice system it can a be a very slippery slope.”

While there are many commonalities, there is no “one size fits all” factor that turns someone towards extremism. “There’s a number of reasons someone would join an extremist group,” Jones said. “Feeling they don’t belong, distrust of the government and police, a lack of belonging in the family — any number of things that might lead them to seek protection and identity.”

Indeed, the judge observed of John: “You are a lonely individual with few if any true friends.”

And just as surely, there is no one thing that turns people away from those same groups. Even if there were a strong evidence base for literature as a way out, John is unlikely to read the line, “I shall do one thing in this life — one thing certain — that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die,” blink away a tear and realise in a moment what a pathetic lie had seduced him.

“People are not in the group one day and out of the group another day,” distinguished professor of sociology Kathleen Blee told the Southern Poverty Law Centre back in 2016. “Also, people have to exit on many levels. They have to exit in the sense of breaking their ties with people, changing who they’re hanging around with. They exit in terms of leaving the lifestyle, maybe the criminal actions or the violent actions they were associated with. And they exit in terms of changing their ideas.”

Beyond the effectiveness, of course, is whether one can imagine a young Muslim man, arrested after bellowing anti-Semitism and homophobia online and downloading a bomb-making manual, sentenced to brushing up on the classics.

“I certainly haven’t seen this with young Muslim offenders — in fact, it’s been quite the reverse,” Jones said. “Harsher sentences are the norm and those leaving prison have a harder time reintegrating due to strict control order being placed on them. I’ve worked on several legal cases to try and reduce the time offenders spend on Extended Supervision Orders.”