Changing Perceptions: A Conversation on Prostitution Diversion with Judge Fernando Camacho

Queens County (NY) Judge Fernando Camacho discusses why he created a prostitution diversion court that helps victims leave a life of prostitution by linking them to counseling and social services instead of sentencing them to jail time. SARAH SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m speaking with Judge Fernando Camacho. Judge Camacho is currently a Queens County Administrative Judge for Criminal Matters. He has served as Deputy Supervising Judge at the Queens County Criminal Court, where he presided over the Domestic Violence Court, and began a specialized court dealing with teenagers charged with prostitution-related offenses. Today he discusses the beginnings of this program and the roles courts can take for defendants with histories of trauma. So I wanted to talk a little bit about what initially gave rise to the prostitution diversion program in the Queen’s County Supreme Court. JUDGE CAMACHO: Well, I was sitting in arraignment back in 2002, 2003, and a young woman named Siobhan who was a runaway from Suffolk County, was in the well about 11:00 at night, and she had been arrested, and she was—I think she was 16, and she had been arrested three or four times for prostitution. And, and I looked at her and the offer, I think was plea the charge and 15 days, and I said I don’t want to do this. There’s got to be an explanation as to why she’s out in the street at the age of 16. I was working in arraignments just for that week and I adjourned her case to my regular part for the following week, just to get to the bottom of it. And the next time the case was on I started asking the attorneys questions, and there were answers that I wasn’t happy with, specifically that I just didn’t think that she was out there of her own free will and she was making a knowing and voluntary decision that we should be prosecuting her as an adult for. So from that point on, rather than giving her a jail sentence I started looking for services for her. After a couple years, believe it or not, she kept coming back, she ultimately succeeded. When she came back and actually got into college, she came back and told me. When she came back to get her driver’s license she came back and told me. And ultimately she turned out to be a tremendous success story. But in the meantime, every time I would come across a young person charged with prostitution, I would ask the same types of questions and I was getting the same answers. ‘How’d you get into the life?’ ‘Well, I got into the life because I was a runaway or I was a throwaway or I ran away from home because I was getting physically or sexually abused at home and I ran away, and I was recruited by a pimp.’ And I got the same stories over and over and over again to the point that it became clear, even to me, that it wasn’t a coincidence: There was something going on out there in our own backyard where young kids who were runaways and throwaways were winding up in vulnerable situations where they were being preyed upon and recruited by very bad people. It also became clear to me that once they were in the street that it was not so easy if not downright impossible for them to leave, and that the way we were dealing with – had been dealing with them traditionally in the criminal justice system just wasn’t the right way. It wasn’t. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t just, and that’s how it started. SCHWEIG: You previously worked as a prosecutor. How did your experiences there help inform this initiative? CAMACHO: I saw how we dealt with young people charged with prostitution and back then it didn’t make any sense to me. Jail is not the right place for these young people. A young person is presumed to be not competent to consent under certain statutory sex offenses, yet the same young person who is not even capable of consenting is now going to be prosecuted as an adult for engaging in prostitution and prostitution-related offenses. And that never made any sense. That’s just silly. All of us who were sitting in that area way back in 1986 understood that these young kids who were being charged with prostitution were going to jail for 15, 20, 25 days, we were just not doing it the right way. We were just not doing the right thing for these kids. And then once I got in a position where I had some discretion and I could do it differently, I ultimately got enough resolve together to say, ‘Look, this is wrong. Let’s do it the right way.’ SCHWEIG: What do you think are some of the issues surrounding prostitution that the courts and especially judges need to be aware of as they deal with these cases? CAMACHO: You know, I’m gonna give everybody the benefit of the doubt, including myself way back when. I just don’t think any of us realized the amount of pressure, coercion that was going on: the threats, the violence. I don’t think any of us realized that if they didn’t go out there and come back with a certain amount of money, they were gonna be beaten. And none of us, I think, realized that. And I think it’s just such a distasteful thing for all of us to just look at these kids, these children standing there in these ridiculous looking outfits—and we just didn’t want to face the truth. And I, I also think in terms of the elected officials who count on the votes of these communities, the community is very outspoken when they find, you know, used condoms on their street, when they have their kids and understandably so: They don’t want their neighborhood to be the track. You know, nobody could argue with that. But they put a lot of pressure to bear upon the politicians. But what I don’t think the response of the people in public service wasn’t the correct response. The response should have been, ‘I agree with you. The neighborhood should not be where this stuff is happening, but the way we’ve been dealing with this problem traditionally is just not accomplishing anything because they’re still there. We can round them all up and put them on a bus and bring them to central booking and they’ll be out tomorrow and they’ll be back on your street the day after.’ So this is not the right way. The right way is to, through education, to actually reach out to these kids and to show them that there is a way out of the life and if this is not what they want to be doing, we will give them the resources, we will give them the ability to leave the life and to do something different like Siobhan did. SCHWEIG: What were some of the challenges you encountered developing this model? CAMACHO: What I had to initially deal with was changing that perception. And I’m talking about changing the perception, first of all with myself, and secondly with the people I work with: my colleagues, with the D.A.’s office, with even the defense bar, with the police department. I mean everybody had to change the way they looked at these kids. And these aren’t bad girls who like to do this. Many of them are poor, unfortunate, lost souls who have no choice but to do this. And then after that, you know, operationally the obstacles were just—I can’t even name them. I mean just in terms of getting all these kids going to the same part, the pimps hanging around the corner waiting for the cases to be called, using my quorum as a place to recruit, getting these kids—the security issues—getting these kids out safely without the, without you know, the pimp waiting outside to throw them in a car and take them back to the track. There’s an inherent conflict, there always has been between the advocates and the social workers, the people who advocate for these kids, and law enforcement, and the police department, and the D.A.’s office because the advocates want the kids to be safe, they want them to get out of the life, but they don’t want them to cooperate with law enforcement against the pimps because they fear for the kids’ safety and rightly so. On the law enforcement side, on the D.A. side, on the police side, they want these kids to cooperate and be witnesses. They may not be as concerned about their safety as the advocates are. So there’s always been that inherent conflict—bridging those differences and those conflicts was a difficult thing to do because if we didn’t get them all at the same table talking about solutions to these problems, it wasn’t gonna work. Once that happened—and I think it has happened to a great degree—you’re getting these advocates agreeing to have these victims cooperate with the DA’s office in prosecution against very, very bad traffickers. At the same time, you have these prosecutors who are willing to take a young kid and put them up on the witness stand and asking the jury to believe them. Traditionally they were reluctant to put these kids on the stand. Their attitude was, ‘who’s gonna believe this prostitute?’ And, and, and now they’re understanding that they have to go beyond that and say to the jury, ‘Look, this is not a – this is a kid who had no choice but to get into this and they had no way out.’ So I think that the prosecutors are now understanding that they can, in fact, persuade a jury that these kids are credible. Um, in terms of resource...