Targeted sympathy in “whore court”: Criminal justice actors' perceptions of prostitution diversion programs

• Published date: 01 April 2021
• Author: Chrysanthi S. Leon,Corey S. Shdaimah
• Date: 01 April 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12166

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Targeted sympathy in “whore court”: Criminal justice

actors’perceptions of prostitution diversion programs

Chrysanthi S. Leon

1

| Corey S. Shdaimah

2

1

Department of Sociology and Criminal

Justice, College of Arts and Sciences,

University of Delaware, Newark,

Delaware, USA

2

University of Maryland School of Social

Work, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Correspondence

Chrysanthi S. Leon, Department of Sociology,

College of Arts and Sciences, University of

Delaware, 325 Smith Hall, Newark, DE 19716,

USA.

Email: santhi@udel.edu

Funding information

U.S. Office on Women’s Health, Office of

Public Health and Science, Department of

Health and Human Services, Grant/Award

Number: WH-CCE-10-001

Abstract

Using interview and focus group data (N =44) from

three study sites, we locate prostitution diversion

program (PDP) professionals within logics of punish-

ment and governance. While critical research on

problem-solving justice emphasizes professionals’

performative and quasi-therapeutic roles, inadequate

attention has been paid to the contradictory logics of

their roles. Involvement in a diversion program rein-

forces underlying assumptions about whom they are

working with and what those people need, in ways

that we argue require critical distance. Professionals

exploit the paradox of assistance through coercion,

and exhibit what we identify as “targeted sympathy.”

Targeted sympathy enhances the ability of these pro-

fessionals to use their discretion to help their clients,

but it also elevates a narrow set of acceptable prob-

lems and interventions. Created with an understand-

ingofstreet-basedsexworkersasvictims,PDPsalso

rely on hyper-responsibilization, expecting defen-

dants to bootstrap themselves over systemic hurdles

with virtually no resources. Thus, while targeted

sympathy may indicate a movement away from the

“othering”that pervades contemporary penality, it

continues to decontextualize individuals and assign

blame and accountability.

1|INTRODUCTION

I mean, one lady in particular, I happen to like her a whole, whole lot. What she

has overcome is amazing. . . . [T]he day she finished [the program], her son commit-

ted suicide the night before. I could not believe she came to court; that just didn’t

make sense to me. But, she’s a wonderful human being who’s just been through a

DOI: 10.1111/lapo.12166

©2021 University of Denver/Colorado Seminary and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

126 Law & Policy. 2021;43:126–148.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lapo

lot of stuff. But she’s better. I’m not gonna say she’s healed, but who really is

healed in America, on this planet? I don’t know if you get healed from your life’s

experience, but you could still have a decent life. That’s what [the program] does

for the women. And if we’re in a position to make a difference, we should, I think.

(Gerrie, Baltimore Social Worker)

Court-affiliated prostitution diversion programs (PDPs) are a form of problem-solving jus-

tice focusing on people arrested for prostitution. Using data from three locations that were

either exploring the use of PDPs or already utilizing them, we examine how Gerrie and other

PDP team members make sense of their work across competing logics. The opening quotation

reveals how our respondents think about PDPs as a partial but worthy attempt to improve out-

comes for a specific group of repeat offenders within a criminal justice regime that punishes

prostitution. Gerrie sees a fundamental similarity between her PDP clients and her professional

peers:

Everybody needs [to reboot] once in a while—judges need it, social workers need it,

teachers need it. We’re humans; we need to reboot. But they’re rebooting from a

lot of stuff—they’ve lost their kids, they’re in dysfunctional relationships, they

probably have mothers who were not totally functioning. Maybe that’s a stereo-

type, but it does happen often. And everybody wants to feel good about them-

selves; nobody wants to drag their burdens and their background and their history

all through their lives.

We open with Gerrie’s description since it signals important features of PDP professionals’

meaning-making as distinct from justice as usual. Throughout our data, PDP professionals

counteract the stigmatization typically experienced by people in street-based sex work

(as demonstrated by our title quote in its reference to “whore court,”a term we elaborate on

below). The PDP professionals in our study demonstrate an orientation to these defendants and

to social problems that is in contrast to traditional justice system approaches. Like other

respondents, Gerrie marvels at her clients’strength in the face of circumscribed choices

(Shdaimah & Leon, 2015). She alludes to pervasive social problems and signals admiration for

the client’s resilience during what was arguably the worst moment of her life. Like Gerrie, most

of our respondents hope that PDPs will offer participants steps toward “a decent life.”

In this study, we locate PDP professionals within logics of punishment and governance,

adding to existing sociolegal scholarship that documents meaning-making during the implemen-

tation of justice system reform, with particular attention to the constitutive power of law

(Ewick & Silbey, 1998). We focus on how respondents perceive and respond to tensions in their

work by making a difference for a small subset of clients within a therapeutic space carved out

from mainstream criminal justice. Prostitution diversion workgroup members recognize and

exploit the paradox of assistance through coercion. They apply the toolkit of therapeutic con-

cepts (see Leon & Shdaimah, 2019), including trauma awareness, within the responsibilizing

logics of the criminal justice system. We use “responsibilizing”to describe explanatory frame-

works in which individuals are held accountable, in contrast with explanatory frameworks that

put structural context at the forefront (see Phoenix & Kelly, 2013). PDP workgroup members

acknowledge that people involved in street-based sex work experience poverty, violence, dis-

crimination, and other structural disadvantages; at the same time, workgroup members partici-

pate in practices of neoliberal governance that decontextualize individuals and assign blame

and accountability, a practice that Valverde and Mopas (2004) refer to as “targeted gover-

nance”(see also Leon & Shdaimah, 2012).

We argue that PDPs—and, by implication, problem-solving justice more broadly—

demonstrate how people with disparate professional and political orientations exhibit what we

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