This chapter develops criteria of work and failure implicit within the Prisons Information Group (GIP). Reading the group’s documents in conjunction with the thought of Michel Foucault, the chapter asks: How did the GIP characterize work or attribute failure and how did Foucault understand both in this period? By analyzing these discursive practices together, the essay first identifies five criteria of failure: discursive, structural, systemic, deconstructive, and productive failure. Second, it tests the GIP against each criterion, (...) marking where it does and does not fail. The chapter therefore offers an internal assessment of the GIP, one that is sensitive to the movement’s own discourse and development. In closing, the chapter draws several implications from this analysis of failure for contemporary prison activism and analysis. (shrink)

This essay argues that publicity is a necessary precondition for both politics and philosophy. Against the backdrop of the traditional dismissal of publicity as a leveling of difference, the author develops Foucault’s positive use of publicity in the Prisons Information Group as a technique of differentiation. The essay therefore proceeds in four parts: 1) it contextualizes the Prisons Information Group within Foucault’s life and work, 2) it identifies four specific modes of publicity utilized by (...) the group, 3) it argues that, through these modes, Foucault embraces classically troublesome elements of publicity (like noise, superficiality, and anonymity) as expressly transformative, and 4) it develops a consequently positive account of Foucauldian leveling. The essay concludes that publicity involves the collective transmigration of thought, word, and deed requisite to both the political and philosophical life. (shrink)

Formed in the wake of May 1968, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) was a radical resistance movement active in France in the early 1970's. Theorist Michel Foucault was heavily involved. This book collects interdisciplinary essays that explore the GIP's resources both for Foucault studies and for prison activism today.

A groundbreaking collection of writings by Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group documenting their efforts to expose France’s inhumane treatment of prisoners. Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970–71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an (...) exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of a longstanding feminist critique that Michel Foucault’s call to anonymity is insensitive to the erasure of marginalized persons, I aim to contribute to a critical account of anonymity as a feminist Foucauldian ideal. I do this in two ways. First, I analyze the tactical role of anonymity in the Prisons Information Group, an organization in which Foucault was involved. Second, I analyze the unique paradoxes of anonymity faced by gender non-conforming prisoners then and (...) now. I conclude that anonymity is ideally a situational and multi-layered tactic. By developing a modality of anonymity accountable to the differential politics involved in the chosen or forced renunciation of a name, I contribute to a critical evaluation of anonymity as a practice of resistance from within and beyond the prison system. (shrink)

Quite shortly after the Prisons Information Group (GIP) was formed, Michel Foucault delivered a public announcement in which he called for a generalized practice of “active intolerance” against a wide range of disciplinary institutions. Due to three consistent scholarly reductions of the GIP’s legacy, the sense of “active intolerance” remains nebulous at best. Cast, by turns, as merely the offshoot of Foucauldian theory, a point of prison data collection, or a short-lived social movement (forgetting its lengthy successor: (...) the Prisoners Action Committee), the GIP has been regularly interpreted as a relatively circumscribed intellectual enterprise. Against these three reductions, we develop an account of the GIP as an inherently collaborative abolitionist effort that was trained on subjugated knowledges. And this, in fact, is the work of active intolerance. (shrink)

This interview with Hélène Cixous took place in her apartment in Paris on March 14, 2019. The interview was conducted in English and subsequently revised for publication. The discussion focuses on Cixous' involvement in the Prisons Information Group in the early 1970's, but it extends to her writing life and activism both before and since.

It's too easy to say of Mai '68 that the police are incurious while protesters are curious, that administrators are incurious and students are curious. A more honest assessment of these moments, striated as they are with social tensions, would identify at least two modes of inquiry and two sets of questions vying for dominance: the one located on the side of the status quo, the other on the side of change. In what follows, I provide historico-theoretical resources to justify (...) that assessment. I first review Michel Foucault and Jacques Ranciere's theories of the police, identifying the incipient role of curiosity in their accounts both of resistance and of power and the police. I then turn to the Prisons Information Group (GIP), where I trace the clear clash between state curiosity as implemented by police and resistant curiosity as practiced by GIP activists. Finally, in light of this clash, I explore implications for interpreting Mai '68 and Black Lives Matter as instances of curiosities at war. (shrink)

The word “intolerance” bears almost exclusively negative connotations. It is treated invariably, almost ideologically as a vice. What would it mean to reconceive of intolerance as a virtue—or, at the very least, a positive affect? In this essay, I analyze two complementary archives of positive intolerance: the records of the Prisons Information Group (the GIP) and the writings of one of its members: Michel Foucault. For the GIP, intolerance—as a militant refusal of intolerable material and political conditions—is (...) essential to the prison activist effort. Relatedly, for Foucault, scholarship—as the creative and/or critical act of naming and changing public awareness of intolerable conditions—can be a mode of political intolerance against an oppressive state. When paired together, these two archives trouble the easy severance of theory and practice, suggesting both that prison resistance efforts involve intellectual assessments of the intolerable and that engaged scholarship often doubles as intolerant activism. Both archives, moreover, agree that such intolerant activism is always rooted in personal investments and local struggles. This analysis allows me to suggest that, if the struggle against forces of marginalization and exploitation mobilizes resistant intolerance as a political and intellectual strategy, then intolerance may very well be commendable. It might, in fact, be virtuous. (shrink)

In this Introduction, we offer, in the first section, a brief sketch of events before turning to track the profound innovations in militancy and theory that Le Group d'information sur les prisons (The Prisons Information Group, the GIP) and its work represent. In the second section, we explore the GIP’s prisoner-centered and largely prisoner-led structure, predicated on the recognition that prisoners have the political knowledge and political agency most relevant to prison resistance movements. In (...) the third section, we trace the GIP’s concomitant reconceptualization of the prison and the intellectual, both of which it embeds in a shared social field of which the former is symptomatic and to which the latter is beholden. In the fourth section, we develop the GIP’s anti-carceral, even abolitionist, legacies implicit within these innovations of militancy and theory, as well as across its archive more generally. Finally, in the fifth section, we close by sketching the GIP archive’s critical reception to date and then carve out new frontiers of interpretive debate in light of contemporary incarceration practices and developments in anti-carceral theory. (shrink)

Welcome to the Monist Interactive Issue group on “Representation in Electronic Philosophy.” As moderator of this group, I want to say a few things about what we were up to, and to give you the guidelines for participants. First, this was an experiment in doing philosophy. Some of the old rules applied, lots of them did not. The discussion was begun with a “starter paper” written by me. I deliberately kept this paper short, and did not write a (...) “target” paper because I wanted to leave open the possibility that the finished product would be a collaborative effort and not a paper with a set of responses attached to it. The latter is familiar to us and we don’t especially need this new way of doing things to get that result. So my starter paper was written as a sketch, with numbered sections. It was also much looser and informal than my usual way of doing philosophy. It was meant to be suggestive rather than definitive, and participants were free to engage, to ignore, or to add to bits of the starter paper as they saw fit. I was genuinely interested in what form the result of a lengthy, collaborative exchange over electronic channels would look like, and that was the main reason for trying this experiment. (shrink)

In one-shot public goods dilemmas, defection is the strictly dominant strategy. However, agents with cooperative strategies can do well if (1) agents are `translucent' (that is, if agents can fallibly recognize the strategy other agents play ex ante ) and (2) an institutional structure allows `assortation' such that cooperative agents can increase the likelihood of playing with their own kind. The model developed in this article shows that even weak levels of translucency suffice if cooperators are able to pool their (...) information to exclude defectors. Computer simulations confirm this claim. The results imply that conditional cooperation can be a successful strategy given translucency and `assortation', even if the game has a one-shot character. The article discusses implications for moral theory against the backdrop of `virtual self-regard' and the concept of moral integrity. Key Words: public good • game theory • prisoner's dilemma • translucency • assortation • group formation • group identity • integrity • altruism. (shrink)

In Pabon v. Wright, the Second Circuit held that the Fourteenth Amendment right to refuse medical treatment contained a corollary right to the information necessary to make an informed decision. Plaintiff, William Pabon, was an inmate at Green Haven Correctional Facility in New York. He named two groups of defendants: his doctors and nurses at Green Haven and his doctors at Dutchess Gastroenterologists, P.C..In October 1996, a laboratory test indicated that Plaintiff may have contracted Hepatitis C. The Green Haven (...) doctors referred Plaintiff to Dutchess for additional testing, where additional tests confirmed that Plaintiff had Hepatitis C. In July 1997, Plaintiff returned to Dutchess for additional evaluation, and the physicians told him that he must undergo a liver biopsy in order to receive treatment for his condition. (shrink)

The British prison estate is characterised by an elaborate mental health infrastructure, an edifice often rearranged to meet the near-permanent mental health ‘crisis’ in its walls. From ‘trauma-informed’ prisons to behaviour change programmes, care for mentally ‘vulnerable’ people in prison has sedimented into the backbone of penal strategy. Much of this is developed through appeals to inclusion: of the vulnerable, disadvantaged, and traumatised people who are increasingly recognised as comprising a disproportionate number of prisoners. One category around which this (...) infrastructure is organised is ‘personality disorder’. Since New Labour's demarcation of this ‘offender group’ in the early 2000s, they are now thought to comprise a majority of the prison population. This article, grounded in prison documents and interviews with former prisoners, looks at the disorder's operationalisation in prison. It shows the disorder to be a broad and malleable category that works to mediate between prisoners, as individual subjects, and an expanding, complex, and shifting prison structure. Prisoners are explained in terms of the diagnosis, as the category’s borders are wide and shifting enough to absorb all kinds of behaviour, beliefs, and experiences. We thus see how the diagnosis simultaneously works to dismiss prisoners’ inner lives at the very moment it claims to understand them—and how this move facilitates penal management. The article uses Althusser's work on subjects and interpellation to make sense of this situation, and prisoners’ tactical navigation of it. The material practices that make the diagnosis real are emphasised, and connected to the imperatives of prison management. (shrink)

The Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) is widely used to model social interaction between unrelated individuals in the study of the evolution of cooperative behaviour in humans and other species. Many effective mechanisms and promotive scenarios have been studied which allow for small founding groups of cooperative individuals to prevail even when all social interaction is characterised as a PD. Here, a brief critical discussion of the role of the PD as the most prominent tool in cooperation research is presented, followed by (...) two new objections to such an exclusive focus on PD-based models of social interaction. It is highlighted that only 2 of the 726 combinatorially possible strategically unique ordinal 2x2 games have the detrimental characteristics of a PD and that the frequency of PD-type games in a space of games with random payoffs does not exceed about 3.5%. Although these purely mathematical considerations do not compellingly imply that the relevance of PDs is overestimated, it is proposed that, in the absence of convergent empirical information about the ancestral human social niche, this finding can be interpreted in favour of a so far rather neglected answer to the question of how the founding groups of human cooperation themselves came to cooperate: Behavioural and/or psychological mechanisms which evolved for other, possibly more frequent, social interaction situations might have been applied to PD-type dilemmas only later. Human cooperative behaviour might thus partly have begun as a cooptation. (shrink)

This article examines international and European regulations on research involving prisoners for consensus, differences, and their consequences, and offers a critical evaluation of the various approaches. Agreement exists that prisoners are at risk of coercion, which might interfere with their ability to provide voluntary informed consent to research. Controversy exists about the magnitude of this risk and the consequences that should follow from this risk. Two strategies are proposed for a method of protecting prisoners that does not lead to discrimination: (...) first, more caution to assure non-coerced consent and second, restrictions on the type of research. Most regulations stress the importance of the principle of equivalence of healthcare in places of detention as part of an efficient protection against research risks and discrimination. All the presented approaches have shortcomings. While 'over-use' of prisoners for research as compared to the general population is ethically unjustified, not granting prisoners access to studies beneficial to their own health because of over-strict regulations is equally unjustified. A middle solution should be preferred, one that grants a minimum of protection together with the lowest possible barriers. Research that does not entail a direct benefit for the individual detainee should be restricted to types of research that have a benefit for detainees as a group and that are of low risk. What will ultimately protect prisoners best, while producing the greatest benefit for them, is access to the same healthcare available to members of the community including research as a true option. (shrink)

In this paper, we claim that Jesus’ command “Love your enemies” is compatible with the fact that (1) for a group of Cooperators and Defectors repeatedly playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game with each other, Defection will be the dominant strategy, and (2) the Tit-For-Tat strategy, a variant of the Eye-For-Eye principle that Jesus refuted in his Sermon on the Mount, had won Robert Axelrod’s tournaments of Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game in the 1980s. By incorporating relevant biblical commands into an (...) informed cooperative strategy, we find that it itself is a strong contender in a secular world of social evolution. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic broke on a world whose grip on epistemic trust was already in disarray. The first months of the pandemic saw many governments publicly performing reliance on epidemiological and modelling expertise in order to signal that data would be the basis for justifying whatever population-level measures of control were judged necessary. But comprehensive data has not become available, and instead scientists, policymakers and the public find themselves in a situation where policy inputs determine the data available and vice (...) versa. This essay asks how we can live with what Amoore has termed ‘post-Cartesian doubt’ in situations of existential risk, and what kind of approach to science and data can answer the moral and human demands of a situation such as the Covid-19 pandemic. I suggest that science and policy could be able to control the pandemic better by addressing the sources of uncertainty and missing data not as gaps in the information landscape, but as individuals who are likely to be members of less-visible and less powerful groups including low-wage workers, the elderly, migrants, prisoners and others. This would shift both data use and policy toward an ethics of care, an embodied approach which asks what people need and how they behave in relation to each other, rather than how to manage population-level behaviour. This approach, I argue, is more appropriate for pandemic response than a utilitarian calculation of how many people each country should expect to lose as a result of the disease. (shrink)

The ‘agents’ of toleration can be divided into three categories: public institutions, groups and individuals. If it is mostly accepted that both public institutions and individuals are capable of toleration, it is not clear that such a capacity can be attributed to groups, although in daily discourse we seem ready to say that a certain social group is (in)tolerant. This article aims to address this issue by investigating the relationship between collective agency and social groups. Formal groups (e.g. corporations) (...) have internal rules and collectively recognized decision-making procedures that constitute a collective behaviour. However, it is not clear if and in what sense such a capacity is also upheld by informal groups. This article discusses some competing criteria to define informal groups and proposes the shared convictions criterion. In conclusion, this criterion is applied to toleration-related issues, so as to reconcile our ordinary understanding of groups’ toleration with a more technical analysis. (shrink)

Ethical codes help guide the methods of research that involves samples gathered from ?at-risk? populations. The current article reviews general as well as specific ethical principles related to gathering informed consent from partner violent offenders mandated to outpatient treatment, a group that may be at increased risk of unintentional coercion in behavioral sciences research due to court mandates that require outpatient treatment without the ethical protections imbued upon prison populations. Recommendations are advanced to improve the process of informed consent (...) within this special population and data supporting the utility of the recommendations in a sample 70 partner violent offenders are provided. Data demonstrate that participants were capable of comprehending all essential elements of consent. (shrink)

In this essay, the resistant potential of curiosity will be first framed by theories of political curiosity writ large (drawn from Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida) and then explicated through three case studies: the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, prison resistance networks in the 1970’s, and a more recent initiative for accessible restrooms. From these archives, an anatomy of politically resistant curiosity will be drawn.

The current study aims to examine the hope levels of theology students in the context of their education level. The correlational (relational) screening method was used in this study. The sample of the study consists of a total of 429 students (328 girls, 101 boys) studying at the Faculty of Theology at Erzincan Binali Yildirim University. Hope levels of the students were determined by Karaca-Kandemir Hope Scale developed by Karaca and Kandemir. The scale consists of three sub-dimensions: goal-oriented, hope and (...) significance, and stability. One-way analysis of variance (ANO-VA) was used for data analysis. According to the findings obtained as a result of the analysis, it is seen that the education levels of the Theology Faculty students cause differentiation in terms of goal-oriented and stability which are sub-dimensions of hope; however, it was found that the scale did not cause any difference in terms of hope and meaningfulness subscale and total hope levels. This finding did not corroborate the research hypothesis that the higher the education level of theology faculty students, the higher their hope level. The results, however, give an idea that theology education can have a positive effect on students' hope levels.Summary: Hope, which is a fundamental feature of human existence, has many functions, both individually and socially. Hope, which is one of the main characteristics that distinguish human beings from other beings, is one of the most powerful tools that help create and implement future designs of individuals and societies. It is possible to see this powerful effect of hope in the object of all human works and actions such as art, literature, and architecture. However, despite the expressed impact of hope, religion, which accompanies it in the existential journey of humanity and is one of its most influential sources of motivation, has the potential to produce a highly useful function on hope. Because religion demands the individual to be future-oriented rather than the past. This demand of religion does not mean that the past actions of the individual and society have no importance. While building the future of the individual and society on lessons learned from the past, religion orders that he should not be a prisoner of his past and that he hopes for the energy he has produced by taking shelter in the attributes of Allah, Most Gracious and Merciful. For this reason, the Qur'an equates despair of Allah's mercy with coming out of religion (Yusuf 12 / / 87).Despite the strong relations between religion and hope, empirical studies on the issue are not yet adequate. However, in recent times, especially with the effect of Positive Psychology, it is a fact that empirical studies have been carried out to determine the relationship of these emotions with religiosity about positive emotions such as patience, optimism, empathy, and self-regulation. One of the positive emotions expressed is hope. However, it is seen that some empirical studies have been conducted on the relationship between hope and religiosity. However, apart from these studies, empirical studies on higher education levels are needed in order to reveal the relationship between hope and religiosity in a healthier way. Because of the strong relationship between religion and hope, it is expected that there will be an increase in parallel with the religious education taken in higher education. From this point of view, this study primarily aims to reveal the strong connection between religion and hope. The main problem of this study, which is based on the primary hypothesis that learning religion at a higher education level, will increase the level of hope of students, is the relationship between theology education and hope. In this study, which was conducted to determine the hope levels of the students of the Faculty of Theology, the method of collecting information related to the questionnaire technique used in the screening model was used.The population of the study consists of 744 students enrolled in Erzincan Binali Yıldırım University Theology Faculty in the fall semester of 2018-2019 academic year. The sample group of the research is 429 students in the faculty during the application period. Accordingly, 144 (33.6%) of the total students in the sample group were in the “preparatory class,” 79 (18.4%) were in the “first grade”, and 78 (18.2%) were in the “second grade,” while 60 (14.0%) were in the “third grade,” 68 (15.9%) were in the “fourth grade.”“Personal Data Questionnaire” and “Karaca-Kandemir’s Hope Scale” were used as data collection instruments. In the “Personal Data Questionnaire,” there are questions about the learning levels of the working group.Karaca-Kandemir’s Hope Scale, which is used in the study, is a scale developed by Karaca and Kandemir based on their cultural codes to determine the hope levels of individuals.The scale is a 5-point Likert type and consists of three sub-dimensions: “goal-oriented,” “hope and meaningfulness,” and “stability.” Of the 13 items in the scale, 8 (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10 and 12) had a positive sentence structure such as “Dreaming about the future excites me,” 5 of them (3, 6, 8, 11 and 13) it has a negative sentence structure such as “I cannot bring the end of a job easily after starting a job.” In the scoring phase of the hope scale, negative sentences were reversed. While the lowest score that can be obtained from the “goal-oriented” dimension of the scale is 5, the highest score is 25; the lowest score that can be obtained from the dimension of “hope and meaningfulness” is 4, the highest score is 20; the lowest score that can be obtained from the “stability” sub-dimension is 4, while the highest score is 20. As a result, the lowest score that can be obtained from the total of the scale is 13, and the highest score is 65. Low scores from the scale indicate that the individual's level of hope is low, and high scores indicate high levels of hope.In order to determine the differentiation between class levels, Single Factor Analysis of Variance-ANOVA was applied to the data set. As a result of the analysis, multiple comparisons were made between the means with statistically significant differences. For this purpose, Post Hoc LSD and Tukey HSD tests were used to determine the source of the difference. The significance level of “.05 “ was taken as a criterion for all these operations. In the research, it was seen that the education they received from the Faculty of Theology students caused a differentiation in the “goal-oriented and stability” sub-dimension of hope; however, “hope and meaningfulness” subscale and “total hope” did not cause any differentiation. This result did not confirm the research hypothesis that “the level of hope differs according to class (education) level and the level of hope increases as the level of education (education) increases hope. However, in the “goal-oriented” dimension of hope, the second and third-grade students of fourth-grade students; In terms of “stability” dimension, the fact that the first-grade students scored significantly higher than the preparatory class students gives an important idea that the education received in the Faculty of Theology can have an effect on hope. However, it is thought that similar studies that will be conducted with a large sample group and centering on all dimensions and hopes of religiosity will produce remarkable results. (shrink)

The prospect of using genome technologies to modify the human germline has raised profound moral disagreement but also emphasizes the need for wide-ranging discussion and a well-informed policy response. The Hinxton Group brought together scientists, ethicists, policymakers, and journal editors for an international, interdisciplinary meeting on this subject. This consensus statement formulated by the group calls for support of genome editing research and the development of a scientific roadmap for safety and efficacy; recognizes the ethical challenges involved in (...) clinical reproductive applications of genome editing but, importantly, rejects the idea that human reproductive germline modification is necessarily morally unacceptable; and highlights the importance of meaningful engagement in discussions of genome editing and the development of regulation and oversight mechanisms to govern future uses of such technologies. (shrink)

Many recent studies of norm emergence employ the "prisoner's dilemma" (PD) paradigm, which focuses on the free-rider problem that can block the cooperation required for the emergence of social norms. This paper proposes an expansion of the PD paradigm to include a closely related game termed the "altruist's dilemma" (AD). Whereas egoistic behavior in the PD leads to collectively irrational outcomes, the opposite is the case in the AD: altruistic behavior (e.g., following the Golden Rule) leads to collectively irrational outcomes, (...) whereas egoistic behavior leads to Pareto-optimal outcomes. The analysis shows that PDs can be converted into ADs either by increasing cooperation costs or by diminishing marginal gains from cooperation; therefore ADs are as empirically abundant as PDs. In addition, the analysis shows that altruists are not the only type of actors who fall prey to the AD; egoists can fall into this trap as well if they possess a capacity for interpersonal control. Where group solidarity is defined analytically in terms of the extent of cooperation in both PDs and ADs, this paper presents a model based on rational choice to account for variations in solidarity. According to the proposed analysis, levels of group solidarity depend on the balance in the group between compliant control, which increases cooperation, and oppositional control, which reduces it. That balance, in turn, depends on the allocation of power within the group. (shrink)

Research involving human participants has been conducted in the Philippines since the beginning of the Spanish colonial period. Such studies are expected to adhere to internationally accepted ethical guidelines. This paper discusses trends in clinical research ethics in the Philippines during the American colonial period (1898‐1946). Specifically, studies were assessed on: 1) their observance of ethical protocols, including review; 2) identification of inclusion and exclusion criteria in the selection of participants; 3) use of vulnerable subjects; and 4) practice of the (...) informed consent process. Only the informed consent process had a significant logistic correlation with progression of years. Recruitment of vulnerable groups was common during this period; children and prisoners were the most common participants. Trends in medical ethics in the Philippines reflected those in the United States prior to the publication of the Nuremberg Code, which served as a milestone in the protection of human welfare in clinical research. (shrink)

_Background:_ Literature has documented the role of family in the outcome of chronic schizophrenia. In the light of this, family interventions (FIs) are becoming an integral component of treatment for psychosis. The First Episode of Psychosis (FEP) is the period when most of the changes in family atmosphere are observed; unfortunately, few studies on the relatives are available. _Objective:_ To explore burden of care and emotional distress at baseline and at 9-month follow-up and the levels of service satisfaction at follow-up (...) in the two groups of relatives (experimental treatment EXP vs. treatment as usual TAU) recruited in the cluster-randomized controlled GET UP PIANO trial. _Methods:_ The experimental treatment was provided by routine public Community Mental Health Centers (Italian National Health Service) and consisted of Treatment as Usual plus evidence-based additional treatment (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for psychosis for patients, Family Intervention for psychosis, and Case Management). TAU consisted of personalized outpatient psychopharmacological treatment, combined with non-specific supportive clinical management and informal support/educational sessions for families. The outcomes on relatives were assessed by the Involvement Evaluation Questionnaire (IEQ-EU), the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12), and the Verona Service Satisfaction Scale (VSSS-EU). Differences within and between groups were evaluated. _Results:_ At baseline, 75 TAU and 185 EXP caregivers were assessed. In the experimental group 92% of relatives participated in at least 1 family session. At follow-up both groups experienced improvement in all IEQ and GHQ items, but caregivers belonging to the EXP arm experienced a significantly greater change in 10 IEQ items (mainly pertaining to the “Tension” dimension) and in GHQ items. Due to the low sample size, a significant effectiveness was only observed for 2 IEQ items and 1 GHQ-12 item. With respect to VSSS data at follow-up, caregivers in the EXP arm experienced significantly greater satisfaction in 8 items, almost all pertaining to the dimensions “Relatives' Involvement” and “Professionals' Skills and Behavior.” _Conclusions:_ The Family intervention for psychosis delivered in the GET UP PIANO trial reduced family burden of illness and improved emotional distress and satisfaction with services. These results should encourage to promote FIs on caregivers of first-episode psychosis patients. (shrink)

Current UK legislation is impacting upon the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of medical record-based research aimed at benefiting the NHS and the public heath. Whereas previous commentators have focused on the Data Protection Act 1998, the Health and Social Care Act 2001 is the key legislation for public health researchers wishing to access medical records without written consent. The Act requires researchers to apply to the Patient Information Advisory Group for permission to access medical records without written permission. We (...) present a case study of the work required to obtain the necessary permissions from PIAG in order to conduct a large scale public health research project. In our experience it took eight months to receive permission to access basic identifying information on individuals registered at general practices, and a decision on whether we could access clinical information in medical records without consent took 18 months. Such delays pose near insurmountable difficulties to grant funded research, and in our case £560 000 of public and charitable money was spent on research staff while a large part of their work was prohibited until the third year of a three year grant. We conclude by arguing that many of the current problems could be avoided by returning PIAG’s responsibilities to research ethics committees, and by allowing “opt-out” consent for many public health research projects. (shrink)

By drawing on a selection of interviews from the website Engaged Philosophy, this paper highlights the work of philosopher-activists within their classrooms and communities. These philosophers have stepped out of the ivory towers and work directly with media, community and political groups, people in prison; or they encourage their students to engage in activist projects. The variety of approaches presented here shows the many ways philosophically inspired activism can give voice to those who are marginalized, shine a light on injustices, (...) expose the root of social problems, and empower others to seek solutions. This work shows the relevance of philosophy to practical problems and the powerful effects it can have in the world. (shrink)

The scholarly works of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault have been subject to ongoing scrutiny for a number of decades. However, less attention has been given to their activities as public intellectuals and the relation between these and their philosophical and theoretical projects. Drawing on their own conceptualization of the role of the intellectual, the article aims to illuminate these issues by examining Habermas’ advocacy of a ‘Core Europe’ and his defense of NATO bombardments in Kosovo in 1999 as well (...) as Foucault’s involvement with the Groupe d’Information des Prisons (GIP) and a wide variety of his interviews, op-ed articles, etc. In showing that the intellectuals’ views differ in important ways from those of the scholars but nevertheless inhabit a crucial position in the overall edifice of their oeuvres, the article concludes that the practices of theorists deserve more attention for a comprehensive and more nuanced account of their thought. (shrink)

This case raises the difficult question of how to respond to patients who appear to lack decision-making capacity, yet retain limited communication that allows them to state a preference for life-sustaining treatment that conflicts with the choice of their surrogate. I argue that the patient’s preference should be honored, even though the patient lacks decision-making capacity, and the preference contradicts the wishes of the surrogate.

Revisiting Lacan's discussion of the puzzle of the prisoner's dilemma provides a means of elaborating a theory of the trans-subjective. An illustration of this dilemma provides the basis for two important arguments. Firstly, that we need to grasp a logical succession of modes of subjectivity: from subjectivity to inter-subjectivity, and from inter-subjectivity to a form of trans-subjective social logic. The trans-subjective, thus conceptualized, enables forms of social objectivity that transcend the level of (inter)subjectivity, and which play a crucial role in (...) consolidating given societal groupings. The paper advances, secondly, that various declarative and symbolic activities are important non-psychological bases—trans-subjective foundations—for psychological identifications of an inter-subjective sort. These assertions link interesting to recent developments in the contemporary social psychology of interobjectivity, which likewise emphasize a type of objectivity that plays an indispensible part in co-ordinating human relations and understanding. (shrink)

Care appears prima facie antithetical to punishment. Since the overlaps between care and punishment are greater than we paradigmatically expect, care ethics offers a more accurate account of prisons: recognising and critiquing both dehumanising carceral violence, and the necessity, presence, and inadequacies of penal care, as well as unlocking ways of thinking differently about structural change without losing sight of individual issues. After introducing care ethics and evidencing the presence of caring practices in present prisons, the article considers (...) how we punish, in terms of the amount, method, and manner. Treating people in punishment as moral equals is important for liberal deontological penal theories. Treatment as equals requires context. Context is intrinsic to care‐ethics praxis, which provides methods of and standards for accessing and applying this information. (shrink)

People in extraordinary situations are vulnerable. As research participants, they are additionally threatened by abuse or exploitation and the possibility of harm through research. To protect people against these threats, informed consent as an instrument of self-determination has been introduced. Self-determination requires autonomous persons, who voluntarily make decisions based on their values and morals. However, in nursing research, this requirement cannot always be met. Advanced age, chronic illness, co-morbidity and frailty are reasons for dependencies. These in turn lead to limited (...) abilities or opportunities for decision-making and self-determination. Exclusion of vulnerable people from research projects would disadvantage them by not covering their needs, which would violate the ethical principles of justice and beneficence. Commonly, vulnerability is attributed to social groups. The consequence for individuals, attributed as belonging to such a vulnerable group, is that the principles of respect for autonomy, justice and beneficence are subordinated to the principle of non-maleficence, understood as avoiding the risk to cause more harm than good. In addition, group-specific attribution could lead to stigmatizing because labelling a person as deviation from a norm violates integrity. For clinical nursing research, the question arises how the protection of vulnerable people could be granted without compromising ethical principles. The concept of relational ethics provides a possible approach. It defines vulnerability as the relation between a person’s health status and the extent to which this person is dependent on the researcher and the research context. Vulnerability is not attributed solely to a person but to a situation, meaning the person is viewed in context. By combining vulnerability as a context-related and situational concept with existing approaches of informed consent, the different ethical principles can be balanced and preserved at every step of the research process. (shrink)

This article discusses the fortuitous genesis of the book of my conversations with Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy and traces some of the intellectual and philosophical sources that informed the specific questions and approaches that inform the dialogue. Davis’ relationships to Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, as well as to Foucault, are discussed. Similarly, Davis’ place within a critical black American political-philosophical tradition is analyzed. The essay focuses mainly, however, on the way in which Davis’ work on the prison industrial (...) complex profiles an unsuspected contribution to political philosophy that links up the disciplinary origins of American democracy with its racial contract to give rise to the prison contract. In the tradition of Charles Mills, Davis’ radical theory of penality unmasks and denounces the over-determined relationship between surplus punishment and the racial character of the US polity in terms of theproductivity of the prison system. (shrink)

Both terrorism and game theory are contested concepts within the social sciences, but in this paper, I will show that a rational approach (game theory) towards the emotion-laden idea and practice of terrorism does aid understanding of the “terrorist theatre”. First, an outline will be provided on the type of actors (game players) that are, or may be, involved to a more or lesser extend in (supporting) terrorism. Then several game models will be assessed on their applicability. This includes averting (...) the joint bargaining paradox when asymmetric actors cooperate to achieve a joint goal, governments who may fare better from their point of view when dividing up refugees into geographically separate areas to decrease the possibility of cooperation between aggrieved groups and recognizing two-speed negotiations, which can have a (detrimental) effect on (deadline) negotiations. Further, an adaptation of the audience cost model explained the “war of nerves” of the terrorist theatre involving the generation of fear amongst its targets and the updating of information on moderate actors by action of extremists. Several mutations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma were discussed as options to prevent mutual harm. (shrink)

Current UK legislation is impacting upon the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of medical record-based research aimed at benefiting the NHS and the public heath. Whereas previous commentators have focused on the Data Protection Act 1998, the Health and Social Care Act 2001 is the key legislation for public health researchers wishing to access medical records without written consent. The Act requires researchers to apply to the Patient Information Advisory Group for permission to access medical records without written permission. We (...) present a case study of the work required to obtain the necessary permissions from PIAG in order to conduct a large scale public health research project. In our experience it took eight months to receive permission to access basic identifying information on individuals registered at general practices, and a decision on whether we could access clinical information in medical records without consent took 18 months. Such delays pose near insurmountable difficulties to grant funded research, and in our case £560 000 of public and charitable money was spent on research staff while a large part of their work was prohibited until the third year of a three year grant. We conclude by arguing that many of the current problems could be avoided by returning PIAG’s responsibilities to research ethics committees, and by allowing “opt-out” consent for many public health research projects. (shrink)

The problems that I address concern the morality and rationality of decisions with respect to the application and practice of science. Formally, the situation is a standard decision theoretic one in which one has a set of alternatives and a set of outcomes. The standard solution is to maximize expected utility. This formal simplicity conceals considerable philosophical complexity. The most obvious is — whose expected utility should we maximize? The second is — are there any moral constraints on what utility (...) assignments we shall allow? The principle of rationality I am assuming is that a rational decision should be based on the total information available. Failure to cooperate in effecting such an amalgamation is subversive with respect to this overriding principle of rationality. It is a fundamental principle of truth seeking. Given the prima facie moral obligation to seek truth, failure to cooperate is prima facie immoral as well. (shrink)

One of the most radical dimensions of Davis’s critique of American democracy is her exposure of the vestiges of slavery that remain in the contemporary criminal justice system. I discuss this aspect of her critical project, its roots in Du Bois’s critique of Black Reconstruction, and the way that it informs her prison abolitionism and her two-pronged program for the formation of a genuine “abolition democracy.” I conclude by reflecting upon Davis’s reticence about abolition as a constructive enterprise and assessing (...) some of the challenges faced by the contemporary abolitionist movement. (shrink)

Internal misconduct is a universal problem in prisons and affects the maintenance of social order. Consequently, correctional institutions often develop rehabilitation programs to reduce the likelihood of inmates committing internal offenses and criminal recidivism after release. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the profile of each offender, both for the appropriate indication of a rehabilitation program and the level of internal security to which he must be submitted. In this context, this work aims to discover the most significant characteristics (...) in predicting inmate misconduct from ML methods and the SHAP approach. A database produced in 2004 through the Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities in the United States of America was used, which provides nationally representative data on prisoners from state and federal facilities. The predictive model based on Random Forest performed the best, thus, we applied the SHAP to it. Overall, the results showed that features related to victimization, type of crime committed, age and age at first arrest, history of association with criminal groups, education, and drug and alcohol use are most relevant in predicting internal misconduct. Thus, it is expected to contribute to the prior classification of an inmate on time, to use programs and practices that aim to improve the lives of offenders, their reintegration into society, and consequently, the reduction of criminal recidivism. (shrink)

The paper reviews anti-Soviet activities of Ivan Hel, a well-known Ukrainian dissident, political prisoner and socio-political figure of the restructuring and independence period of Ukraine. It is pointed out that after returning from long-term confinement he never ceased fighting for restoration of independence of Ukraine and initiated / cofounded a number of informal socio-political organizations which activity was focused on undermining the political system of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It is indicated that the restructuring period set up a new (...) page in I. Hel's political biography as the glasnost and democratization policy resulted in revival of the socio-political life of the UkSSR and allowed to set up a range of informal national-cultural and political organizations which member the Ukrainian dissident was in the second half of the 1980s. Among his closest associates to be mentioned were M. Osadchyi, Igor and Iryna Kalynets, Z. Krasivskyi, V. Chornovil, L, Lukianchenko, Mykhailo and Bogdan Goryn, V. Barladianu et al. It is stated that over the period under research I. Hel cofounded the Ukrainian Helsinki Group - the Ukrainian Helsinki Union, "Memorial", local units of the People's Movement of Ukraine for restructuring, the Ukrainian initiative group for release of prisoners of conscience. Concurrently, I. Hel was an active participant of the so-called 'religious dissidence' - he headed the Ukrainian Catholic Church Protection Committee which activities had an explicit political focus: in addition to the fight for legalization of the Greek Catholic Church in the UkSSR, the organization encouraged dwellers of the region to fight with the imperious regime. A conclusion is made that the peak of I. Hel's socio-political activity fell on the late 1980s - early 1990s. Over that period he was victimized by the Soviet punitive and repressive system for involvement in the so-called 'meeting democracy', participated in elections for the Supreme Council of the UkSSR and the Lviv Regional Council. It is pointed out that I. Hel's political / anti-Soviet activity was aimed at democratization of the existing regime, development of the national patriotic outlook of the local population and breakup of the Soviet Union. (shrink)

Several philosophers have discussed informal versions of a "symmetry argument" that seems to show that two rational maximizers will cooperate when they are in a prisoner's dilemma. I present a more precise version of that argument and I argue that it is valid only if some crucial statements are misinterpreted as material conditionals instead of being interpreted correctly as subjunctive conditionals.