Women of the Street

This is a book about people who make their living by engaging in street-based sex trading and criminal justice and social services efforts to curtail it through the work of police officers, public defenders, judges, probation officers, or court-mandated therapeutic treatment providers. Coauthored by an anthropologist and a legal scholar, the book explores these interactions and the cultural context in which they take place by drawing upon six years of ethnographic research with hundreds of women involved in street-based prostitution and illicit drug use, as well as dozens of the criminal justice and social services professionals who regularly interact with them. The book focuses on the criminal justice–social services alliance, which positions itself as a punitive-therapeutic partnership among law enforcement agencies and state, municipal, or independent nonprofit social services entities that police or otherwise regulate women involved in street-based prostitution and illicit drug use. Such policing and regulation rely on an interventionist discourse that positions the women’s decision making as the product of traumatic interpersonal encounters rather than of the exclusionary socioeconomic realities that frame their lives. The book’s balanced approach results from its unique methodology, with Dewey inhabiting a number of distinct roles as a participant observer on the streets, in services providers’ offices, and in correctional facilities, and as an alliance professional through her work as the admissions coordinator of one of the few transitional housing facilities for women leaving street-based sex trading.