Houston’s SAFE Court Offers Victims of Human Trafficking a New Path

11/09/16 • -1 min

New Thinking, from the Center for Justice Innovation

In this New Thinking podcast, Ann Johnson, an assistant district attorney and the human trafficking section
chief with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, discusses her office’s strategies for combating
human trafficking, including increased enforcement against traffickers and buyers, and diversion from prosecution
for victims. One of the office’s diversion programs, SAFE Court, gives those aged 17 to 25 who are charged with
prostitution the opportunity to clear the charge from their criminal records by completing a year-long program of
monitoring and social services. SAFE Court was created with support from a Smart Prosecution grant from the U.S.
Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance. To learn more, visit the Association of Prosecuting Attorney’s
Smart
Prosecution website.

ROB WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, Director of Communications
at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking podcast. Today I am speaking with Ann Johnson,
who is an Assistant District Attorney with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Texas. She is also
the Human Trafficking Section Chief of that office. For those who may not realize, Harris County is where Houston
is located, very large county. Thank you very much, Miss Johnson, for joining me today.

JOHNSON:
Thank you. It’s an honor to be here. It’s an honor to speak with you on behalf of District Attorney Devon
Anderson and the other folks that are working tirelessly to combat human trafficking in the Houston area.

WOLF: You’re here today and tomorrow to observe what goes on here in New York at some courts that are
also working to address human trafficking.

JOHNSON: Yes, we are very fortunate that our SAFE court
team, which is a prostitution diversion court, our defense attorney, our probation officer, our judges and our research
partner and myself have been able to come up and visit two of your companion courts to be able to work with our peers
and exchange ideas and see about the innovations that are taking place here locally.

WOLF: Well,
as I said when I introduced you, you are the Section Chief for the Human Trafficking Division in your office. You
do have a robust program going on there as well. I wanted to talk to you about that. In particular, I thought we
could focus on what you guys are calling the SAFE court, which I understand stands for Survivors Acquiring Freedom
and Empowerment court. I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about how that court got started and what its
goals are.

JOHNSON: The vision for this court actually started about four years ago when then
District Attorney Mike Anderson hired me to come in as a human trafficking specialist. I had been with the DA’s
Office. I had left for health reasons and I was actually doing juvenile defense work and began representing children
who were charged with prostitution. Through the course of that time in private practice, not only did we challenge
a case of an individual charged with prostitution of which the Texas Supreme Court ruled in the case of IN RE: B.W.,
that children are the victims of child prostitution not the offenders.

Myself and District Attorney
Devon Anderson were actually the two founding defense members of a court called GIRLS court, which is for Growing
Independence and Restoring Lives, which assist children at risk of human trafficking, who are in our Juvenile Justice
System between the ages of 10 and 17. With this background, I came back to the DA’s Office in February of 2013
and the commitment at that time was just recognizing that Houston was well known as a hub of human trafficking and
District Attorney Anderson had this vision to see how we could best combat the issue and reenergize our focus within
the DA’s Office.

At the time, we began looking at cases of individuals charged with prostitution
because we knew from the Texas Human Trafficking Prevention Task Force report that the State Department was estimating
that we identify about 0.04% of victims in existence. We knew that we had hundreds of people being charged with the
offense of prostitution. The commitment was to start with the new vision from the legislature, which was that now
in Texas, if you are a victim of human trafficking, it’s a defense to prosecution for prostitution.

Our office has taken this commitment that that’s a defense that we value and want to assist the defense
bar in identifying. We began this new procedure of reaching out to the defense bar, talking with individuals who
were charged with prostitution and helping them identify and disclose a human trafficking defense. We’re very
proud of those efforts, but what w...

WOLF: You’re here today and tomorrow to observe what goes on here in New York at some courts that are
also working to address human trafficking.

Previous Episode

Taking a Collaborative Approach to Addressing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Justice System

Tshaka
Barrows, deputy director of the Burns Institute, discusses his organization’s collaborative and community-centered
approach to addressing and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. Barrows spoke with Robert
V. Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, after participating in a panel on Race and
Procedural Justice at Justice Innovations in Times of Change on Sept. 30, 2016.

TSHAKA BARROWS: We
call it a system, but it really isn’t a system. It’s much more of a grouping of semi-autonomous agencies
that have very little accountability to each other.

ROB WOLF: Hi I’m Rob Wolf, Director of
Communications at the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m in North Haven, Connecticut at the Justice Innovation
in Times of Change conference. Sitting down with me is TShaka Barrows who is Deputy Director of the W. Haywood Burns
Institute, which works to address racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. The institute is based in
Oakland, California. You’ve come a long way to attend the conference and participate and to sit and talk with
me, thank you very much.

BARROWS: I’m glad to be here.

WOLF: Let’s
talk about the work of the Burns Institute and in particular, how you work with jurisdictions to reduce racial and
ethnic disparities in the justice system. You have a specific approach you take to looking at this issue and trying
to address it. Maybe you could summarize for me what that approach is.

BARROWS: At the Burns Institute,
our approach is to build a collaborative of the different agencies that make up the justice system and I always tell
people, I just told the group, we call it a system, but it really isn’t a system. It’s much more of a grouping
of semi-autonomous agencies that have very little accountability to each other. The whole notion of trying to address
disparities has to be done with that context in mind because much of one agencies decision bump into the next, bump
into the next and the impact is felt by the individuals who are going through it and we see it in the disparity numbers.
To really create a strategy to address it you have to have all those key players from each of those agencies as a
part of your collaboration. We also fundamentally don’t think that just having those kind of traditional stakeholders
is enough. Our process requires that we engage meaningful participation from community stakeholders who’ve had
experience with the justice system, who live in the neighborhoods that our data shows are the target neighborhoods,
where more people are coming from, so that they can both bring that experience from having traveled through the system,
though the various agencies, being passed from one to the other, but also what it’s like living in the community
that is targeted for higher involvement for various reasons, policies, policing policies, could be that there’s
a lack of resources, any number of conditional factors.

This whole notion of creating more fair
notion of procedural justice can’t be done without accounting for that fact that certain neighborhoods are much
more highly representative in the system, our process we really aim for participation with community stakeholders,
which is very different. People are a little bit afraid of that. The idea that you’re sitting in a meeting sharing
data with people who are upset with the agency, who did not feel that they were treated fairly, who are angry about
the realities that folks in their community face, is a threatening notion for most traditional stakeholders who already
a conversation of race in this country, typically is a bit unnerving for people, it’s not like that’s a
regular practice that we have.

WOLF: And you literally bring everyone together in the same room?
That’s the process, it’s like, “Let’s all sit down together.” What does that look like,
how many people are actually sitting around a table or in a auditorium?

BARROWS: That’s a
great question. We build a collaborative and it’s a process to even build it. We don’t try to just come
in with a cookie cutter kind of prescription. We want to understand from the local players. Justice happens locally,
there’s culture. Who do they think are the key people they need to be there and how many? So sometimes we may
get huge representation from one agency, where it’s like, “You guys are kind of dominating the meeting.”
and we may need to adjust that so there’s a need to attend to the actual formation. Typically it’s, I’d
say, between 10 to 20 stakeholders d...

Next Episode

How Can Lawyers Help Address Poverty and Eviction? A Conversation with Law Professor Raymond Brescia

In this New Thinking podcast, Raymond H. Brescia, associate professor of Law at Albany Law School, speaks with
Aubrey Fox and Robert V. Wolf of the Center for Court Innovation about the role lawyers can play in addressing poverty
and eviction, why New York City has been dramatically expanding funding to provide lawyers to respondents in Housing
Court, debt collection cases as the next great issue for public interest attorneys, and how a good lawyer is like
a patronus from a Harry Potter book.

ROB WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, Director
of Communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Joining me today is Aubrey Fox, who was my colleague here at
the Center for Court Innovation for about 15 years, where he helped set up a number of innovative programs that we
run, including Bronx Community Solutions, and he is now helping out in various capacities as a consultant. Today,
he and I are going to do a podcast together. Aubrey, let’s tell listeners who we’re speaking with today.

AUBREY FOX: We’re interviewing Ray Brescia, who is a Associate Law Professor at the Albany Law School.

WOLF: Why are we speaking with him?

FOX: Rob, as you know, the Center for Court Innovation
is known for our work on criminal court programs and we operate criminal courts and partnership with the New York
State Court system all over the city, but people may know a little less is that we also have some new experiments
in the civil justice space.

WOLF: Specifically, civil refers obviously to noncriminal. That’s
family, housing, that sort of thing?

FOX: Exactly. Two of the programs that we’re running
now, one is called Poverty Justice Solutions, in which we assign recent law school graduates to nonprofit civil justice
firms around the city, and they work mostly on housing court cases. We also have new program called Legal Hands,
where we employ volunteers and train and equip them to give advice to people who are facing issues, in hopes that
it can help them keep out of court in the first place.

WOLF: I know Poverty Justice Solutions
is focused particularly on working with people who face evictions.

FOX: Yeah, I mean a lot of
the nonprofit civil justice law firms in the city focus on eviction and housing court cases, and there’s an
immediately obvious reason why. A lot of New Yorkers face issues with their housing, and we know now that there are
some very direct links between housing and poverty. People who struggle to pay their rent, if they get evicted, there
are all sorts of negative consequences that accrue from that. The city is paying a lot more attention to try and
intervene, and at the very least provide legal representation to people who are facing eviction in housing court.

WOLF: It’s both a more humane approach, trying to prevent people from losing their homes, but there’s
a practical aspect too, that it’s going to cost the city, and impact the quality of life for both the tenants
and people who live in the city if they don’t prevent these evictions.

FOX: Yeah, I mean
there’s one estimate just produced by the city council that you could save about $300 million dollars, the city
that is could save about $300 million a year if it kept around 5,000 families out of shelters. It costs about $43,000
per family per year to put someone in a shelter. Obviously, if there is an appropriate way to keep them in the housing
that they currently have, and thus keep them from going into a homeless shelter, then it would seem that everyone
would be better off.

WOLF: I guess the rationale is that without representation, they may be losing
their homes, their tenancy unfairly, because they don’t have the right advocate. Legally, if someone was articulating
their position and their rights, they hopefully would be able to stay in their home.

FOX: Yeah,
I mean the housing eviction cases are often very complicated, and sometimes the existing rules and laws aren’t
applied because in this case, the defendant who’s facing eviction doesn’t know their rights, doesn’t
have legal representation. It’s an issue that the city is really directly focused on, and as you say, not just
because losing a house, your home is a huge personal crisis, but because the consequences of losing your home end
up being faced by the city quite often.

WOLF: Well so let’s get Professor Brescia on the
phone. Just so people understand, I’m actually in our office in Manhattan, you are in your special studio in
New Jersey, also known as your home. Now we’re going to be joined by Professor Brescia, who we’re calling
in his office.

FOX: In Albany.

WOLF: In Albany, there you go.

FOX:
Yes, all right.

WOLF: Okay, let’s get him on the line. Ray Brescia, welcome to the podcast.

PROFESSOR RAY BRESCIA: Thank you ...