Human Trafficking Courts (HTC), first implemented in the early 2000s in the US, fall within the spectrum of specialized courts built on the therapeutic jurisprudence model. HTCs are based upon the conception that individuals who engage in any form of sexual labor are primarily victims of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. Therefore, in partnership with an extensive network of community-based organizations, HTCs coordinates the delivery of victim assistance services intended to redirect defendants charged with prostitution and related offenses from carceral punishment. This qualitative study draws on interviews from seven different HTCs in three states to examine perceptions of justice.
Located firmly within dimensions of access to justice, namely the administration of justice, the feeling of justice, and the cultural values and commonsense view of justice, this paper draws on 38 interviews with legal actors (judges and lawyers) who administer justice in HTC and 35 victims/defendants who engage in state-led problem-solving strategies to resolve issues surrounding their vulnerabilities to sex trafficking/sexual exploitation. These victims/defendants have chosen HTC as an alternative to the regular criminal court process. Thus, it is within reason that they expect a fair process and a just outcome at a reasonable or acceptable cost. Similarly, the legal actors are bound by legal and ethical limits of assisting criminal defendants who are also deemed victims. Therefore, the quality of victim assistance administered/delivered is explicitly measured in terms of dimensions of justice, not whether victims/defendants are “satisfied” in a general way. In other words, this paper unearths access to justice measured from the point of view of the individuals delivering it and the individuals experiencing the process. The objective is to understand if the participants and stakeholders of HTC feel the process is fair and have an intuitive sense that the HTC program represents justice.

Though there is a growing body of international evidence demonstrating the outcomes of fines and related financial punishments for those who cannot afford to pay, these have yet to be integrated into a robust literature that explains how fines achieve their punishment effects and why these are felt so differentially. Instead, a tacit acceptance of the disproportionality of the punishment effect of fines underlies many of the theoretical accounts that currently exist to explain the fine and its centrality to contemporary criminal legal systems.

Using evidence from practitioners working with women who have been fined in Scotland, this paper re-visits the concept of fines as an ‘Auto-Punishment’, a punishment that relies on the co-operation of the person sentenced (Young, 1999). The practitioners’ evidence offers a view of a process wherein the imposition of a fine/fines results in an extended and complicated entanglement with the criminal legal system for those who cannot ‘co-operate’.

Fines both exacerbate and are exacerbated by the contexts of the lives of those fined who are re-configured as ‘chaotic’, even as there is widespread acknowledgement of the structural challenges they face. Co-operation with the conditions of financial punishment becomes both a final hurdle and a significant marker of pro-social change and progress, even though, as this paper argues, time and distance effectively rob fines of any meaning.

Within the limited criminological literature concerning fines (especially from within the UK), this paper aims to offer new ways to articulate the process of financial punishment and to encourage a reconsideration of the effects of punishment via financial deprivation that acknowledge disproportionality as a starting point for critique.

British Society of Criminology Conference
University of Strathclyde, 9-11 July 2024

Title:
“There is no such thing” –
Meaningful human contact in prison under international law

Author:
Deborah Russo
Early Career Researcher
University of Edinburgh

Key words: isolation, meaningful human contact, solitary confinement, Mandela Rules 2015, prisons

Abstract

This paper reflects on the notion of “meaningful human contact” as expressed in the Mandela Rules 2015 (the UN revised Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners), specifically rules 43 and 44 relating to solitary confinement. The concept, however, remains vague and often misunderstood at the ground level, demonstrating how language in international law can lose its meaning when attempted to be applied in practice.

Meaningful contact for prisoners held in solitary confinement was first explored at the International Trauma Symposium in Istanbul in 2007, where experts met to develop international norms on solitary confinement which later became embedded in the Mandela Rules in 2015. The statement issued following the symposium however, provided no clear definition of meaningful contact or indication of what it entailed. So whilst it prescribed what the lack of it meant, it gave little insight into its actual meaning.

Recent fieldwork carried out in Scottish prisons for the purposes of my PhD suggests a different reality of meaningful human contact for prisoners and their everyday existence. “There is no such thing” is a direct quote from one the participants involved in the project, who, like others, did not place much value onto human contact in prison. This paper aims to explore this issue in further detail and flesh out how the reality of the isolation faced by prisoners could be better reflected in the language of international norms.

Frameworks of rights for victims of crime have emerged following the 1985 UN Guideline into victims and abuses of power. Individual states developed declarations based on this Guideline, however, most promulgated rights that were non-binding administrative standards. Decades later, we see the emergence of substantive rights that can be enforced, although available binding rights are fragmented, and the mission is incomplete. The advent of greater awareness of gendered disadvantage, #metoo social movements, and need for procedural protections for sex offences victims, has emphasised the need for enforceable victim rights, including the need for legal representation for victims in and out of court. The advantages and disadvantages of progress toward enforceable rights for victims will be considered.

It has been widely observed that co-witness discussion may result in memory conformity between interaction partners. This detrimental effect of collaborative recall on eyewitness testimony is accounted for by multiple and interrelated psychological mechanisms, such as social contagion, retrieval-induced forgetting, and collaborative inhibition. Moreover, it is highly context-dependent and modulated by a variety of factors. Empirical findings, nevertheless, often show inconsistency with predictions and the hypothesised underlying processes are less convincing in some scenarios than others, if not contradictory at times. To mitigate this ambivalence, the paper proposes that individual memory distortion during co-witness discussion should not always and necessarily be understood to be the result of disruptive / inhibitory processes, or a pressure to conform. Rather, it may occur because collaboration itself becomes constitutive of the process in the sense that interaction partners co-determine what and how to remember. Based on phenomenological accounts of remembering and second-person engagement, the paper argues that witnesses discussing details of a crime co-construct their memories by reciprocally and dynamically incorporating each other’s perspectives, attitudes, and emotions about what they have seen.