Discretion

This chapter holds that the structural and cultural forces embedded in both professional and street communities significantly constrain individual discretionary authority in interactions between street-involved women and alliance professionals. Discretion comprises the nuanced implementation of personal judgment and the mandates or norms governing work-related practices, and hence involves a process that fundamentally emerges in interpersonal encounters rather than being completed defined by professional procedures or norms. This chapter discusses these interactions by devoting a subsection to each of the everyday contexts in which they take place, including everyday police encounters, criminal and problem-solving courts, and probation or other forms of court-mandated oversight. It also includes a subsection that discusses how women seeking services at a transitional housing facility describe themselves in the life history narratives they write as part of their applications.

Occupational Risks

This chapter argues that the criminal justice–social services alliance pathologizes women’s street-based sex trading and illicit drug use as individual responses to previous traumatic events and resulting flawed thought processes that encourage what alliance professionals often characterize as “high-risk behaviors.” This ideological position draws upon prevailing U.S. cultural norms and attendant structural forces regarding personal responsibility and appropriate gendered sexual behavior in characterizing particular aspects of street involvement, specifically homelessness, substance abuse, criminal justice system involvement, and interpersonal violence, as uniquely compounded and totalizing for women. Chapter subsections specifically address prevailing theoretical conceptualizations of risk in public health and the social sciences, quantitative data on the women’s demographic characteristics, women’s perspectives on their own occupational risks, and alliance professionals’ perspectives on the women’s, as well as their own, occupational risks.

Harm Reduction and Help Seeking

This chapter contends that alliance positioning of street-involved women as damaged by dysfunctional families and communities neglects the structural forces that inform the women’s everyday lives. Resulting attempts to provide therapeutic services, while intended to address the complex reasons why women struggle with substance abuse, homelessness, and involvement in sex work, focus almost exclusively on women’s individual decision making. This focus fails to acknowledge that sex trading is itself a help-seeking strategy for women that allows them to meet their immediate needs without facing restrictive services provision conditions that often include lengthy wait lists, mandatory self-disclosure, and abstinence from illicit drug use. Many alliance professionals, particularly those who work directly with street-involved women, readily acknowledge the limitations of these prevailing approaches, and yet they remain bound by systemic constraints that position the women’s collective struggles as individual problems. Chapter subsections specifically address prevailing conceptions of help and harm reduction in social sciences and public health literature; present quantitative data on the women’s housing, formal education, and employment and health histories; and describe women’s perspectives on their needs and harm-reduction strategies, as well as alliance professionals’ perspectives on the women’s needs.

Workin’ It, Advocating, and Getting Things Done

Chapter 1 argues that women’s street involvement comprises a variety of criminalized income-generation and resource-acquisition strategies, including prostitution, that result in part from their cultural and spatial-environmental estrangement from legal work opportunities and social services. Situating the women’s everyday hustles within this gendered and racialized sociolegal and economic context considerably complicates centuries-old debates on prostitution by elucidating how, for most street-involved women, sex trading constitutes the most immediately available solution to their need for money, drugs, and shelter. This chapter details how women differ considerably by age, other sources of income, criminal justice system involvement (as indicated by quantitative arrest and conviction data), and life experience in terms of how they approach sex trading. Likewise, it explores how alliance professionals engage in their work differently depending upon their personal and/or professional subscription to particular ideological frameworks informed by the cultural and legal contexts in which they live and work.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the criminal justice–social services alliance, a punitive-therapeutic confederation of federal, state, and municipal law enforcement agencies and state, municipal, or independent nonprofit social services entities. The diverse bodies and individuals comprising the alliance are united by a cultural ethos characterized by the belief that street-based prostitution and illicit drug use are inherently harmful to women, who require sociolegal intervention and subsequent demonstration of their readiness to express accountability for their life circumstances. Encounters between street-involved women and alliance professionals take place within the context of systemic intimacy, a paradoxical relationship between individuals who belong to oppositional social groups and who consequently must assess one another’s motivations and inner states as they go about the daily business of making a living. This chapter also presents a review of the research methods employed as well as associated ethical considerations, and a chapter overview.

Conclusion

Our conclusion questions the utility of an alliance between criminal justice and social services professionals that remains dominated by punitive criminal justice paradigms. The alliance’s ideological focus on changing individual women’s decision-making processes translates into practices that punish street-involved women for decisions they make in the context of the pervasive gender, class, and ethno-racial discrimination that limits their life choices. Hence even when street-involved women receive therapeutic social services in the alliance context, more often than not they return to the same socioeconomic conditions that impelled them to work the street in the first place. Street-based sex trading and the illicit drug use it often supports stem from and take place within the context of women’s complex lives in communities struggling with multiple oppressions. The nuances involved in such situations require pragmatic, evidence-based legislative and policy approaches that reflect these complex realities; without these, the system will continue to fail the very women it aims to assist.