‘I Have Different Goals Than you, we Can’t be a Team': Navigating the Tensions of a Courtroom Workgroup in a Prostitution Diversion Program

ABSTRACT

This study explores how professional stakeholders navigate individual and institutional goals, ethical standards, and perspectives within the courtroom workgroup of a prostitution diversion program. We draw from semi-structured qualitative interviews of current and/or past professional stakeholders (N = 22) and past program participants (N = 3). Though collaboration and consensus building among workgroups is a core tenet of problem-solving courts, findings from this study reflect a more complicated landscape. Respondent interviews illustrate the centrality of collaboration and role blurring; the necessity of reciprocity and balance in the team; challenges of role delineation; diversity in understandings about acceptable professional behaviour; and the protective techniques some stakeholders use to shield current and future participants from harm. Findings emphasise that while prostitution diversion programs are often seen as the least bad of several suboptimal options, stakeholders must balance their personal and professional ethics, expectations, and goals often without guidance in order to provide services and support to participants therein.

KEYWORDS:

• Diversion
• problem-solving justice
• sex work
• interprofessional practice
• therapeutic jurisprudence
• street-level bureaucracy
• criminal justice-social services alliance

Notes

1 This is the legal term meaning that they do not contest the facts of the case which constitute the basis for a criminal conviction.

2 A major deficiency of this program is that data regarding completion rates and other measures is so hard to obtain.

3 We omit details regarding time periods when respondents engaged with PDC to protect confidentiality. Where a specific agency name might reveal respondent identity, we designate the type of organization.

4 In the US sex work is regulated at the state and local level where it is overwhelmingly criminalized. There have been growing calls for change in this policy including in Philadelphia where sex work has been de facto decriminalized through prosecutorial policy. PDC and other programs that provide alternative criminal legal system pathways for people arrested for sex work generally describe these as prostitution diversion programs, reflecting the criminalized nature and characterization of the sale of sex in public venues. We therefore use this terminology when referring to these specific programs.

5 This and all other names are pseudonyms.