The problem with prostitution problem solving

This week in North Philly Notes, Corey Shdaimah, Chrysanthi Leon and Shelly Wiechelt, coauthors of The Compassionate Court?, provide their observations about studying prostitution diversion programs. (Part 2 of 2)

For many years we have been studying court-affiliated prostitution diversion programs (PDPs) at various stages of their inception and implementation. As Corey’ previous blog suggests, we find ourselves caught between the critical reflection of our academic training and deep empathy for all of the stakeholders. What is often missing from policy debates is an accurate portrayal of workday conditions of under-resourced agencies that struggle to provide the assistance or the efforts to survive in a city that lacks much of a social safety net. By the same token, a lot of joy, humor, and love is also missing from these debates. Criminal legal system actors and women arrested for street-based sex work are a savvy, thoughtful bunch and they often help each other with advice and material resources.

One of the main reasons we wanted to write The Compassionate Court? was to provide the broader public with a picture of the complicated reality that we see when we spend time in courtrooms, probation offices, people’s homes, and treatment programs. A book provides an opportunity to share the three-dimensional understanding that we have championed, and one goal of our book is to provide what Nancy Fraser referred to as “everyday world policy analysis,” a walk through policy as it would happen on the ground in real time. It also allowed us to provide fuller stories for some of our study participants. In addition to formal observations and interviews, our conversations and embeddedness in a variety of locations creates a familiarity that often feels truncated by the traditional article format built from decontextualized fragments. Each chapter in The Compassionate Court? contains an expanded vignette drawing on multiple interviews and interactions with a different participant, which we hope provides our readers with some of the familiarity that we have developed with the interviews. We imagine that, as Project Dawn Court participant “Amy” suggested, knowing a person’s story will open readers’ minds.

Many of our readers will be empathetic toward the women who participate in Project Dawn Court and the Specialized Prostitution Diversion Program. We imagine that readers may be less empathetic toward professional stakeholders, especially given the critiques that we have shared (often quoting these very same professional stakeholders!). We hope that our extended vignettes and weaving of perspectives will allow our readers to recognize the binds faced by these professionals, most of whom are women—just like the overwhelming majority of people arrested for sex work. That they act from a place of urgency and love does not negate problematic saviorism that some grapple with. But to view them only through such a critical lens obscures the larger capitalistic patriarchal narrative that too often serves up the street-level service providers for critique. We should also be asking who benefits from the entrenched inequality and privileging of criminal legal spaces as the last-stop safety net. It is no wonder that PDP participants’ say the primary positive aspect of PDPs is that they are treated like human beings. This low bar for a positive rating shows how people arrested for sex work, especially those who use drugs, are treated. We ask the question, does this need be the case? What would happen if all systems treated people like human beings? We doubt that PDPs would be as welcome in the criminal legal system landscape by participants or by professional stakeholders and welcome readers to let us know what you think.

Visiting Project Dawn Court

This week in North Philly Notes, Corey Shdaimah, coauthor of The Compassionate Court?, with Chrysanthi Leon and Shelly Wiechelt, provides observations from her research on prostitution diversion programs. (Part one of two entries).

In December 2021 I visited Project Dawn Court (PDC). It was the first time I had seen anyone in person since the start of the COVID pandemic. Fresh in my mind were the interviews I had been conducting with program participants and other stakeholders, many of whom were no longer engaged with Dawn Court, and who hold wildly divergent assessments of whether PDC is good or bad, and in what ways. I was struck by how good it felt for me to be in this space, and the warmth that is there. There was a genuine feeling of camaraderie among many of the women in the program and care emanating from the program staff. As someone who sat on the benches with program participants monthly for three years, and in subsequent visits, this was familiar, and I was eager (COVID-caution to the winds) to share hugs. There was also a sense of sadness and nostalgia that something is ending. This court meeting was also a farewell party for the retiring judge and a longtime therapist who is leaving for new career options. The program is small, with participants who have been in Project Dawn for years. The “spigot” has literally been turned off by self-proclaimed progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner, who will not bring charges for prostitution against those who sell sex, and who is the target of dismay and anger. Although there may have been folks in the room who think this is good, none shared this publicly. Program graduates and participants and the professional stakeholders were vehemently opposed and broke into diatribes in conversation and in their prepared farewell messages in open court. Most saw this as abandonment: The concerns of women who need help will once again go unheeded. They viewed Larry Krasner and his progressive vision as part of a larger, ongoing “discourse of disposal” (Lowman, 2000).

This narrative of abandonment shows both how important Prostitution Diversion Programs (PDPs) are, and how they are also doomed to failure. This group of program participants and most program stakeholders—nearly all women—have created a space where (some of them) find a semblance of common ground. Even those who most decried the program, and women who were removed from the program, made meaningful personal connections. They found mutual hope, concrete assistance, and in some cases friendship. But few of the women were left better off. There are still insufficient resources for assistance that would help people who would prefer not to sell sex on the streets of Philadelphia or Baltimore to leave this option behind. There are also insufficient resources to help most of those who have stopped selling sex, either by choice or by mandate, to thrive. I was upset with myself for being nostalgic, and upset by how easily I could be lulled by the familiarity, warmth, and kindness of individual women to blunt and suspend my own critical stance. What does this say about the mutual eagerness to make connections among people whom I imagine do not usually connect—across class, race, and stigma? Is that the real purpose of this court? To make everyone here feel just a little bit better about an overall lack of empathy and isolation? And where is the line between a prurient curiosity and a desire for connection, especially in this space where sex and suffering are the main topics of conversation? What are the systems that place these women, myself included, into this space of longing and desire? How are visions of mothering and other forms of women’s work implicated in this peculiar blend of maternalistic rescue that focuses on nurturing while tasked with a mission of preparation for the world? This role largely involves making sure that those in our charge are ready—ostensibly for their own safety but also for the “good” of a larger society—to conform to normative conceptions of how, where, and with whom, women can present and use their bodies and their sexuality. Is one of the reasons that we cannot imagine large large-scale change somehow built on this fear of abandoning and being abandoned?