New York state’s court system considers its Human Trafficking Intervention Courts—special courts sold as an alternative to jail for women facing prostitution charges—to be a national model for such programs. From Queens to Columbus, these courts share a common presumption: that women engaged in sex work are, in the words of the judges on the bench, “victims, not criminals.” As former Judge Judy Harris Kluger, one of the courts’ prominent advocates, once told the New York City Council, “By and large, we work under the assumption that anyone who’s charged with this kind of crime is trafficked in some way.” But at the same time as the judges and other court staff tell women they are victims, they continue to criminalize them.



These courts and the marketing behind them are a perfect example of how what’s called “innovation” in criminal justice can perpetuate the same injustices that allegedly inspired reform in the first place. The human trafficking courts do this with a carceral feminist twist—as if the problem facing women pushed into the criminal justice system is that police, prisons, and prosecutors haven’t yet learned how to liberate them while also arresting them.



The trafficking court model caught some high-profile criticism this week in The New York Times, but sex workers have long opposed these programs, arguing they endanger their communities by using anti-prostitution policing to push them into stigmatizing or just plain ineffective social services, all in the name of saving them from sex work.

Though trafficking courts may now be subject to criticism from those who were once supportive of them—one social service organization serving Asian women, Womenkind, left the courts this year, the Times reports, “after deciding it was easier to build trust outside of the court system”—this is far from the first time they’ve been scrutinized.

The Red Umbrella Project (RedUP), a peer-led organization of people engaged in the sex trades, released in 2014 what was the first (and, for some years, the only) report evaluating the human trafficking courts in New York. They found that in Brooklyn and Queens, the people funneled into the courts reflected the racial profiling police engage in with other arrests: 69 percent of defendants facing prostitution charges in Brooklyn were black, and in Queens, 58 percent were East Asian. They also pointed out that the “services” offered by these intervention courts were inadequate to help even someone who did want to leave sex work, while the arrests revictimized the same people the courts said they were saving.