This article is based on a sociological research, combining qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations, undertaken in “radicalization assessment units” (RAU) in French prisons. The RAUs are units that hold, for a fixed period of time, a dozen prisoners described as “Islamic terrorists” or “suspected radicalization” so that a multidisciplinary team can evaluate their degree of radicalization. In the first section we will show how the climate of terrorist attacks during the period prior to opening of the RAUs not only engendered a warlike rhetoric that would overdetermine the decline of trust in detention. It also engendered institutional improvisation whereby these special units were set up one after another without much preparation. Secondly, we will detail the RAU’s security organization and the warlike relationship that grew between the guards and prisoners, between radical defiance and criminology of the Other. In the third section we will return to the evaluation work itself. During this evaluation work in the RAU, although each professional makes efforts to refine the prisoners’ profiles, the job is deeply biased by an obsession to fight against the “ taqîya” and against “dissimulators”. Lastly, at the end of the evaluation, the evaluation summary and recommendations for final orientation are overdetermined by the imperative to avoid professional risks.
This study examines lessons learned from the design, implementation, and early results of an integrated managed care pilot program linking member benefits of a Medicare-Medicaid health care plan with community services and supports. The health plan's average monthly costs for members receiving an assessment and services declined by an economically meaningful, statistically significant amount in the postintervention period relative to the preintervention period compared with those who did not accept an assessment or services. The results along with the lesson learned from the pilot are viewed by the parties as supportive of further program development.
This article is based on a sociological research, combining qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations, undertaken in “radicalization assessment units” in French prisons. We will first summarize the context of negotiating the research agreement, amidst a climate of panic on the part of political authorities who feared terrorist attacks. Then we will describe empirically the way the researchers were particular objects of surveillance on the prison grounds, in a way that was different, in its nature and unusual intensity, than the usual surveillance of other people who come into the prison. Lastly, we will show that this surveillance spreads beyond the prison walls, for example, the researchers were tailed when they left the prison. A reflexive work would explore all the ambiguities of this surveillance—from protection to control—and at the same time consider this surveillance of the researchers not as a contextual element of the study, but an object of the analysis in its own right. In doing so, this case study more broadly examines the methodological challenges of ethnography undertaken in difficult fieldwork together with a grounded theory capable of integrating into the analysis the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the research process itself.
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