The backtracking takes on added significance as recent attacks, including last week’s rampage in London and the previous week’s attempted on soldiers at Paris’ Orly airport, were carried out by ex-convicts who may have been radicalized behind bars.

France is not the only country reconsidering how it responds to radicalization. Britain’s contentious Prevent program, which seeks to identify residents at risk of being radicalized, has come under criticism by rights groups and an expert for the United Nations who said it stifles free speech.

France’s experiments with preventing radicalization were conceived during a literal state of emergency following the extremist attacks on the staff of Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket in January 2015 and the Paris bombings and shootings that left 130 dead 10 months later. The ad hoc attempts focused on the prison system, a key incubator for many would-be jihadis, and programs that tried to target those already on the path to extremism.

They did not go as hoped.

Sonia Imloul, the former head of a de-radicalization program that had support of the French Interior Ministry, was convicted of misuse of funds this month after trial testimony showed she had government funds for the organization deposited directly into her account.

Imloul received a four-month suspended prison sentence, although her lawyer says the 60,000 euros ($65,000) she received from the government was a drop in the bucket for what the program needed. The program operated out of an apartment and used university students instead of trained professionals to counsel families of young people who had left for Syria, according to the trial testimony.

Meanwhile, in February, the last occupant of a residential program in the Loire Valley wine country that was meant to rehabilitate extremists was convicted of advocating terrorism.

Residents of the area, who were promised before the group home opened in September that none of the occupants posed a danger, were infuriated to learn that one young man was linked to the same jihadi network as one of the suicide bombers who attacked the Bataclan concert hall in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015.