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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 11:13 pm
Time: 11:13 pm
Results for prostitution diversion programs
1 results foundAuthor: Yale Law School, Global Health Justice Partnership Title: Diversion from Justice; A Rights-Based Analysis of Local Summary: The past decade has seen a national rise in the promotion and establishment of "diversion" programs as alternatives to traditional criminal justice system pathways and processes. While the landscape of diversionary programming is rapidly evolving and dramatically varied, most programs are united by a rhetorical aim to move individuals who commit lower-level offenses away from incarceration and re-penalization and towards "rehabilitative" services. Most recently, this "divert and rehabilitate" logic has been applied to prostitution-related criminal charges, leading to the proliferation of what we aggregately refer to in this Working Paper as "prostitution diversion programs," or PDPs. While progressive at face value, PDPs lack the evidence base and public accountability mechanisms to support their claims of doing good in the lives of people selling sex. In many cases, PDPs simultaneously position the sellers of sex as "victims," but in fact embed their treatment in the criminal justice systems, thus seamlessly collapsing of all sex work into a sorely misguided trafficking frame while retaining coercive control of people in the sex sector. At the same time, the PDP approach avoids the harder and more important inquiries into why buying and selling sex ought to be criminal at all (absent other crimes), and why and if courts are appropriate bodies for assessing service needs and compelling therapeutic treatments. Diversion from Justice: A Rights-Based Analysis of Local "Prostitution Diversion Programs" and their Impacts on People in the Sex Sector in the United States, by the Global Health Justice Partnership of the Yale Law School and School of Public Health, in cooperation with the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center-NYC, takes as its starting point a skepticism of criminal justice system involvement in the management and provision of social services, particularly when the communities forced into its gates – in this case, those engaged in the sex sector or presumed to be - are deeply marginalized and disempowered by the same state touting its beneficence. Our distrust is also linked to an overarching concern that the criminal law has shown little evidence of positive impact in the lives of sex workers, and that genuine progress in criminal justice reform is not possible without the complete decriminalization of sex work and associated activities. Prostitution diversion programs present numerous challenges, both for sex workers stuck in the web of the criminal justice system and for researchers seeking to understand their implications in a systematic way. This Working Paper represents one of the most thorough attempts to date to make an account of the hyper-local, opaque, and poorly understood national trend toward prostitution diversion through building a provisional taxonomy for categorization as well as a justice-informed framework for evaluation. The report is structured as follows: - The Introduction (Section I) to this Working Paper situates PDPs in their broader political and social contexts, briefly outlining their historical evolution and beginning to trouble the ideological foundations upon which contemporary programs are laid. The Introduction makes clear the need for the present report: while the number of PDPs - and therefore the reach of the criminal justice system - continues to expand, there is an alarming dearth of information on their actual impacts on the health, rights, and dignity of defendant/participants. - Section II of the report assembles a national mapping and taxonomic scheme of PDPs operating at the time of primary research in 2016, systematically categorizing the different practices, frameworks, and structures that comprise municipal PDPs across the U.S. This section sequentially lays out how PDPs operate on a logistical level, from program development and entry, to participation and service requirements, to exit processes. This cataloging of programmatic elements throws into sharp relief the ways in which the term "PDP" masks what is actually an enormous diversity of very local, jurisdiction-driven processes that share little overlap in their operations. The lack of standardization and highly context-specific arrangements make these programs difficult to monitor, and therefore difficult to hold accountable with regards to potential injustices or harms to rights - or even to their own stated goals. - Section III of the report proposes a rubric by which PDPs can be evaluated against their own goals, as well as against basic tenants of social justice that most purport to uphold. Our analytical review of PDPs and criminal legal provision of social services reveals that these programs often fail to uphold the human rights and dignity of defendant/participants given their intrinsically coercive design and implementation; that they do not consistently provide available, accessible, acceptable, and quality health and social services to sex workers, nor do they have the intentions and resources to meet the structural needs of sex workers; that they adjudicate in ad hoc and unreviewable ways that further entrench sex workers in court and criminal justice systems; and that they are not implemented in ways that are transparent, sustainable, and accountable to those most affected. To highlight some of the most egregious examples, we encountered programs that sought to monitor and control personal relationships, both intimate and familial, of defendant/participants; one where defendant/participants were required to perform unpaid labor (sell beer in sports stadiums) in exchange for the social service (in this case, housing); and another in which the PDP-affiliated service organization disguised their fundamentalist and religiously-charged rescue model in rhetoric of "freeing" women, but the materials make clear that freedom is defined by the organization's understanding of the life God wanted for them. - Finally, Section IV of the report offers concluding remarks and a set of recommendations for PDP reform, emphasizing the need for sustained research into localized practices, as well as internal reviews of each program with an eye towards radically minimizing the scope of criminal justice involvement. While the major inconsistencies across PDPs in the U.S. muddies any attempt at evaluating PDPs as a family of interventions, their shared positioning (as structural alternatives) within the criminal justice system triggers alarms regarding court overreach and compromised rights and well-being of sex workers, underscoring the need to shift power towards community-based and - led systems of accessing services. This Working Paper, with its national scoping and analysis, should be read in conjunction with another similarly framed GHJP/SWP report entitled Un-Meetable Promises: Rhetoric and Reality in New York City's Human Trafficking Intervention Courts, on the prostitution "diversion" courts in New York City known as "Human Trafficking Intervention Courts" (HTICs). Many of the analyses and concerns raised in the national survey are echoed and expanded in our analysis of practices in a single city setting. This complementary report can be found on the Yale GHJP website at: https://law.yale.edu/ghjp Details: New Haven, CT: Yale Law School and Yale School of Public Health, 2018. 79p. Source: Internet Resource: Working Paper: Accessed November 27, 2018 at: https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/center/ghjp/documents/diversion_from_justice_pdp_report_ghjp_2018rev.pdf Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/center/ghjp/documents/diversion_from_justice_pdp_report_ghjp_2018rev.pdf Shelf Number: 153848 Keywords: Diversion ProgramsProstitutesProstitutionProstitution Diversion ProgramsSex Workers |