An independent study Ayelet Cartolina Kaminer

Human Trafficking Intervention CourtS & Penal welfare

In September 2013, New York launched the Human Trafficking Intervention Courts system, which consists of 11 specialized courts across the state that deal exclusively in the cases of trafficking victims and sex workers who are charged with selling sex

the HTIC system ostensibly promises to clear defendants’ criminal records if, and only if, defendants clear the high bar of mandated counseling set by judges during sentencing. This stick-and-carrot relationship between engagement with court services and record expungement is a fundamentally punitive one. Often, it forces sex workers and trafficking victims to choose between a short-term income loss (from therapy/education sessions during hours that would otherwise be spent working) or a long term loss of housing, employment or public benefits due to having a criminal record.

This practice of gatekeeping welfare services within the framework of a carceral system has been called “penal welfare”

It is crucial to understand the manners in which HTICs utilize” trauma”, projected victimization, and gatekept welfare services to broaden the carceral landscape that sex workers are forced into.

Relevant terms & Concepts

The ““victim/defendant” Matrix

A commonly used term in CCI materials is “victim/defendant,” a phrase whose definitional haziness alludes to a systemic confusion within the HTIC system about whether defendants are victims or perpetrators.

As a practice, judges within the HTIC system tend not to inquire whether defendants are, indeed, victims of trafficking. This appears to be an intentional feature of the HTIC framework- as stated in the CCI toolkit, a core challenge facing human trafficking courts is :

“how does the court hold the defendant accountable for his or her criminal act and accountable to complete mandated services, while knowing the defendant could be a victim of sex trafficking or other forms of violence?”

-Human Trafficking and the Courts: Viewers’ Guide to “from Defendant to Survivor.” Center for Justice Innovation,

The court system is reliant on a dual consciousness approach which maintains awareness of the possibility that defendants may not be victims. Nevertheless, by deliberately not inquiring about whether a defendant is a victim of trafficking or a consenting sex worker, the court can “hold the defendant accountable” while disempowering them through assumed victimization.

the HTIC system expects defendants to “stay out of trouble” without providing any substantive welfare assistance to help defendants become established in a new field. Thus, sex workers who face proceedings in HTIC courtrooms must choose between returning to their prior occupation and risking increased punitive consequences in future arrests or transitioning into a new field and facing the associated potential loss of income, housing, childcare, etc.

The Victim/Defendant conflation appears to be a core tenet of most courts modeled after the CCI’s recommendations for trafficking courts. This is perhaps most evident in Los Angeles’s Succeeding Through Achievement and Resilience (STAR) Court, which deals primarily with cases of underaged victims of trafficking arrested for prostitution.

In these cases, of course, there is no haziness with regard to whether the court’s defendants are culpable; their age and inability to consent makes clear that they are victims of trafficking. Nonetheless, the court still claims its goal is to “ hold youth accountable for their actions.” Even in a court where defendants cannot be considered responsible for the crimes they have been charged with, judicial responsibilization prevails; STAR judge Catherine Pratt has admitted to asking underaged defendants “Why are you doing this to yourself? It is a really bad choice.’

The Judicial Council’s Center for Families, Children & the Courts. STAR Court Study: Initial Results. Jan. 2020.

New York: Center for Court Innovation: Malangone, Danielle, Robyn Mazur, and Miriam Goodman. Responding to Sex Trafficking in Your Jurisdiction: A Planning Toolkit., pg. 23, 2015. https://www.courtinnovation.org/publications/responding-sex-trafficking-your-jurisdiction-planning-toolkit

Robbins, Liz. “In a Queens Court, Women in Prostitution Cases Are Seen as Victims.” The New York Times, 21 Nov. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/nyregion/in-a-queens-court-women-arrested-for-prostitution-are-seen-as-victims.html. Accessed 2 Feb. 2020.

The 42nd Street Development Project

In 1995, the New York City Council approved Resolution No. 1322, which contended that crime rates rose and property values decreased in areas surrounding “adult” businesses- sex shops and pornographic theaters. The resolution manadated that “adult establishments shall be located at least 500 feet from a church, a school, a residence district.”

Around the neighborhood of the Midtown Community Court, state-funded initiatives such as the 42nd Street Development Project envisioned a rebranded Times Square that wass 'clean, safe and friendly’ enough to attract corporate investment in the neighborhood. This attempt to ‘clean up’ certain areas, such as Times Square- shows clearly that the ‘problem’ identified in the ‘problem solving’ HTIC is not, in fact, human trafficking. Rather, it is the loss of corporate investment that the CCI and City Council attributed to the eyesores plaguing Times Square.

“"We now have virtually a prostitution-free environment…It's a much more civil place to live in."

-Chuck Spence, President of the West 44th Street Block Association, 2001

“ Having a street prostitute on your block is like having a car alarm on your block go off all night,”

-Barbara Feldt, Residents Against Street Prostitution

Residents Against Street Prostitution

Residents Against Street Prostitution (RASP) was established in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan by Barbara Feldt ​as “a citizens group to fight prostitution.”

When the 54th street Manhattan Community Court opened in 1993, an electronic newsletter was sent out to Hell’s Kitchen ​community members, encouraging them to visit the court and watch the “fascinating.. arraignment process of arrests that were ​made in your local Precinct.” This newsletter- sent out by community court officials- acknowledged that Residents Against ​Street Prostitution, a community group, had already been conducting court watch in the court, as prostitution was one of the ​“most common offenses” appearing before the community court. The newsletter offers some insight into the community ​jurisdiction structure put forth by supporters of the court system, who envisioned a court system guided by the sentencing ​recommendations of local residents. Defendants who were sentenced at the Midtown court were expected to “pay back the ​community…through work projects such as caring for street trees, removing graffiti, cleaning subway stations, and sorting cans ​and bottles for recycling.” Most striking, however, is the communal crowdsourcing described in the newsletter itself, which ​prompted community members to not only inform the court of any local cleanup needs, but also encouraged them to provide ​information to law enforcement. Residents Against Street Prostitution and its members were heavily involved in this ​community input effort, and would reportedly “telephone specific information to the police, giving addresses…and descriptions” ​of those they perceived as criminally deviant.

“A successful Assault on street prostitution”

In a Center for Court Innovation report, Center for Court Innovation advisor Robert Victor Wolf classified community ​policing as integral to “The Midtown community's successful assault on street prostitution” and recommended that similar ​structures of community involvement in the policing, arrests, and judicial pursuit of sex workers in other areas where sex ​workers labor.

Wolf’s 2001 report describes the aforementioned system as a “one-two punch,” in that it allows the court to aide in ​community ‘clean up’ efforts in two manners. The first of these is through the utilization of sex workers’ labor to, literally, ​rid the Midtown area of litter (Wolf’s report uses the term “community restitution” in reference to this mandated labor, and ​claims that as of 2001, some variety of “community restitution” was mandated in 86% of prostitution cases processed ​through the court.) The specific implementation and structure of this mandated service-in which defendants were forced to ​wear “blue vests emblazoned with the Court’s name” during their service shifts in order to “show the neighborhood that ​offenders are paying back the community for the damage they have done” seems particularly aimed at publicly shaming ​and stigmatizing defendants.

While some CCI officials have, in the past, claimed that these mandated uniforms and highly visible forms of punishment ​are in fact progressive tactics to “helped put a human face on crime” and ensure that community residents can no longer ​“talk about offenders as a separate class of people,” community service oriented sentencing in prostitution-related cases was ​clearly a practice aimed at the eradication of visible ‘street-walking’.

This is evident from the court’s establishment of “a special evening community restitution project…created just for ​prostitutes.” As the 2001 CCI report claims, "We tried to put community service at a time when it cuts into their [defendants’] ​sleeping or working.”

Though the CCI report claims this approach to be one which lowered recidivism rates and lessened engagement with sex ​work, it seems that it primarily served to exhaust sex workers. As Rosie Cruz, a defendant sentenced at MCC in 1993, told the ​New York Times “Making whores work? I got 49 convictions! You think stuffing envelopes for a few days is going to stop ​me?”