Judge James Ho of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has had enough, and he announced last month that he will no longer hire clerks from Yale. Today, if I look past all the controversies, I still think that’s mostly true.īut the controversies are bad: speakers being shouted down at law school events scholars suspended or fired student groups at Berkeley Law announcing that they will no longer host speakers who support the existence of Israel and so on.Īnd there has been a parade of bewildering scandals at my own alma mater, Yale Law School: the police called to escort speakers from the building to protect them from student protestors plans to deny financial aid to students who work at allegedly discriminatory religious nonprofits administrators persecuting a conservative student group and threatening a student’s career over the allegedly offensive words “trap house.” (I had to look it up, too.) If you’d asked me 12 years ago, I’d have said America’s lawyers supported free speech almost universally. This work is an initiative of the Gruber Project for Global Justice and Women’s Rights, and the research for the reports and the collaboration between GHJP and SWP was supported by a generous grant from the Levi Strauss Foundation.What should we make of the judges boycotting Yale Law School? ![]() These reports were developed through clinic projects, and student summer internships at the SWP and in Atlanta to continue our collaboration with local partners and related research efforts. We hope these reports stimulate greater public discussion and accountability as well as advocacy at local, state, and national levels by sex worker advocacy organizations, health and harm reduction coalitions, and allies who seek to ensure that diversion processes overall serve justice and health more consistently. While the reports make clear that genuine movement forward requires the complete decriminalization of sex work and reinvestment of resources in systems led by affected communities, they also propose incremental steps that can be taken to mitigate immediate harms to sex workers caught in PDPs and cycles of criminalization. ![]() While PDPs claim to provide alternatives to traditional criminal justice processes by moving defendants into ostensibly rehabilitative social services, the reports suggest that the programs are unable to fulfill their promises and are instead expanding the coercive reach of penal institutions by enabling them to act as gatekeepers of social services. Moreover, the programs are generally incoherent in their purpose and claims, opaque in their data collection, and under-resourced and insufficiently integrated (and thus relatively unaccountable) with very mixed outcomes: some affected populations appreciate the less punitive approach and offers of support, while others feel there is no real commitment to their rights or health and that the services offered do not match their actual desires and structural needs. The reports suggest that PDPs arise from mixed narratives of rescue and harm-reduction, in which all sex sector activities become conflated with a reductive and inaccurate “trafficking” narrative. This work developed out of research examining the double threat of prosecution for sex workers in the United States through the intersection of laws that criminalize prostitution and laws that criminalize HIV exposure or transmission, and conversations with public health, HIV/AIDS, LGBT, anti-racism, anti-incarceration, and civil rights advocates who had been following the municipal debates around prostitution and related arrests with concomitant failures in legal and social service regimes. ![]() These inter-related reports contain the initial findings of a national mapping and examination of the different histories, models, and possible impacts of “prostitution diversion programs” (PDPs), as a ‘go to’ responses to street level offenses, allegedly modeled on harm reduction and drug courts and claiming an evidence base for policies. ![]() Diversion from Justice is national in scope and offers an initial taxonomy and justice-informed evaluation framework for PDPs across the United States, while Un-Meetable Promises is a deep-dive investigation into the policies and practices of a PDP in a single setting: NYC’s Human Trafficking Intervention Courts. In 2018, GHJP and SWP released two inter-related reports on prostitution “diversion” programs and their impacts on the rights, health and dignity of people who trade sex in the U.S.
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