Forty-five years ago, Sayyid Qutb, a sharp literary critic widely considered one of the Muslim Brotherhood's most influential thinkers, was hanged in Egypt. This was two years after his release from Cairo's Tora prison hospital. During his imprisonment, and unbeknownst to the Egyptian regime, Qutb spread his ideology through a secret organization that had formed between the prison's walls. Underground operatives jailed in the same wing held frequent meetings and delved into the study of their leader's teachings. Using his younger sisters' visits to the prison, Qutb succeeded in smuggling the books he wrote in his private library in prison to the outside world. He even outwitted the prison guards and charted a path for Islamist activists both inside the prison and outside of it. His ideology painted the secular regime in Egypt as the enemy of Islam, declaring that it lacked legitimacy. It's no coincidence that the book he smuggled out of prison is called "Milestones" - the path that he outlined in his notebook in prison was later walked by radical Islamists in Cairo. At first glance, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's announcement about toughening conditions for Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails seemed like a necessary step that would equate conditions for Hamas prisoners with those of captured Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier Gilad Shalit, as a way to leverage Hamas. Yet, upon deeper inspection, there appears to be a deeper problem, one that does not necessarily relate to this or to the luxury afforded the prisoners, but rather to the policy of imprisonment itself. The Israeli defense establishment believes that many prisoners who were involved in terrorist activities will return to their old ways after their release in a prisoner exchange. This belief only supports the hypothesis that prison is likely to function as a breeding ground for indoctrination and a platform for radicalization. Years of reading hundreds of journals and testimonies of imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood members has yielded crucial insight: Prison creates daily friction with "the enemy," meaning wardens and security forces. These encounters reinforce Islamist prisoners' image of their struggle and contribute to further radicalization. So what can be done to deal with the challenge of radicalization- While tracking cell phone calls allows for intelligence gathering, access to a course or book on the subject of Qutb or Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's philosophies contains the seeds of disaster. Similarly, while television can be used to convey information in a supervised manner, news reports on the firing of missiles into Israel certainly raises morale among prisoners and increases their determination to struggle against Israel. Studies on the prison experiences of Muslim Brotherhood members have shown that when there is a division of authority between inmates and prison officials over the organization of daily prison life, the former exploit that opportunity to advance their own agenda. In other words, Islamist prisoners are filling the vacuum when it comes to training and planning activities. Television and cell phones are a means to an end, but they are certainly not the main concern when prisons allow systematic preaching. The prison administration must be in control of the jails. The system begins to falter when the alternative agenda of prisoners takes precedence - when the classes, lectures and sermons are what set the tone. Experience has proven that when Islamists sit together in the same prison and have regular contact, especially with their leaders, as well as access to information about the outside world, there are bound to be repercussions. Since it's difficult to supervise the activities of senior Hamas operatives once they are released from prison, we must preempt and tighten the supervision within prisons as part of an overall policy. The bottom line is, the Israel Prison Service is responsible for preventing the creation of an autonomous space within prisons, where an agenda is set that is in step with political Islam.