'Victims, Not Perpetrators': Ohio's Changing Actions To Change Habits Court

Judge Paul M. Herbert of the Changing Actions To Change Habits Court in Ohio's Franklin County Municipal Court explains how a problem-solving approach to prostitution treats offenders as victims, giving them the support and links to social services they need to escape a cycle of exploitation and abuse. 

The following is a transcript of the podcast:

Raphael POPE-SUSSMAN:
Hi, I'm Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation. Today, I'm speaking with Judge Paul M. Herbert who sits on the Franklin County municipal court in Ohio. Judge Herbert is the creator of the Changing Actions to Change Habits, or CATCH court, a diversion program that places women facing prostitution charges in treatment in lieu of jail. Judge Herbert, thank you for speaking with me today and welcome.

Paul M. HERBERT:
Well, thank you.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
So tell me, what is the history of the CATCH court?

HERBERT:
Well, in 2009, we started a court to try to help curb the recidivism rate among prostitutes in Columbus, Ohio. It's very expensive for all the police and the jail and the attorneys and the court costs and things like that. And I saw this problem and wanted to try to get folks to be able to stop coming back through our jails. That was the initial impetus behind the program.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
And how has it developed since then?

HERBERT:
Well, it's grown to an amazing degree, well beyond my wildest dreams. And I have grown myself, not really even understanding what was behind prostitution when I started this. We didn't even have a human trafficking law in Ohio until 2012. So I didn't even realize that prostitution is really at the root of human trafficking. So as we went along, just saving one person, one by one, one on one, and we eventually started to... My mentor, started telling me that he thought this was human trafficking.

So as I read through the federal definitions, I thought, "Wow, this really is... What's at the root of this is a whole system that's in place, an evil [inaudible 00:01:54] system to try to take our women and girls right here in Columbus, Ohio, and right there in your own neighborhood and manipulate them, get them to fall in love with them and then take them down a very dark path that is devastating."

POPE-SUSSMAN:
So can you speak specifically about how your approach differs from a traditional court response to prostitution?

HERBERT:
Sure. We basically consider prostitutes, while they have violated a law and need to be held accountable for that, we basically treat them like victims and we offer them a trauma based care in order to exit that lifestyle. So a woman comes in, it's all voluntary. A woman has to come in and say, "You know what? I want out of this life. I want to escape this slavery that I'm in and I want help."

And once she does that, we put her through some assessments, both drug and alcohol, mental health assessments, readiness for change. And when we find a person that we believe is right at the spot, was perfect to leave the lifestyle of human trafficking, we offer a lot of resources to help her get out, including housing, all the basic needs, drug and alcohol treatment, and also cutting edge trauma treatment, which is really what's at the core of their problem is trauma.

We've learned something significant that is new that hasn't taken place in your traditional 60 year old model of addiction recovery. And that is we're starting the trauma treatment as soon as we can get a person stabilized. And we were finding that we used to have 75% of our women would run from treatment and only 25% would stay. And now we're completely reversing that because the reason we're finding that a majority of these women are using drugs is to medicate the pain of the trauma that they've been through. And then when you start to cure the trauma, they don't want to use drugs anymore. It's a very logical approach, but it's working extremely well. They still have the ravages of the drug addiction and some of them have to work through that addiction to the lifestyle, but it's been amazing watching them grow through this process.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
I'm curious what it's like to stand in your courtroom.

HERBERT:
Oh, wow. The only thing that I can imagine is it's like someone giving you a bath in the holy spirit, whatever that must be like. It's just so neat to see women and girls who have been completely mislabeled and maligned in many respects by everyone in our society, including the police, judges, prosecutors, and to see that love at work, it's just a pleasure for me to sit there and knowing where they came from and to watch how happy they are and filled with gratitude for what they have. You don't see a whole group of people filled with gratitude very often. And so it's just really pleasurable to be in there. It's just this huge sense of love and support and it's really great.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
How do you create a safe space in your courtroom for the women who are coming before the bench? Many of them having had a long history of trauma.

HERBERT:
Yeah. It takes a while. Initially, when they come in, they don't trust anybody and especially not a man who's pretty much been at the root of all bad things that's ever happened to them since they were little girls, which we should probably talk about that too. But it's hard. It takes time to build the trust.

Now, after the years that we've been at this, we actually have a reputation on the street of someone you can trust. So that's been kind of good, just having that reputation out there. So women have heard about it and they come in, they want to ask more questions and then they get to meet myself and the staff. So it's building the trust relationships is key.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
What would you say are the greatest challenges that you have faced in the years of the CATCH court?

HERBERT:
Well, it's been changing the culture. This is an area where people still believe prostitution's the world's oldest profession. And now as laws become more sophisticated, actually, you can't be a human trafficking victim in our country without being a prostitute and that's what people miss. They see the movie Taken and they think that this is all involving some foreign born people that are brought over here, don't speak English, when girls in all the neighborhoods throughout Columbus, Ohio and I'm sure your towns as well, have been victim to this.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Can you offer specific recommendations for other jurisdictions in terms of how they might go about trying to implement this sort of program, how they might go about trying to change the culture?

HERBERT:
Sure. Number one, I want to start off, we just had an independent study done of the CATCH court program by an outside organization. And the numbers are incredible. 72% of all women who are accepted into the human trafficking court do not recidivate. That's an amazing statistic when you look at how often they were coming back before. So if you want to do this for fiscal benefit, you're going to get that. But it's also really cool to watch the generational healing that goes on right along with it.

So if you want to start this, you can do a it one of two ways. Either you can do it the expensive way which I do, or you can do it the less expensive way, which could be equally effective. I don't know. The way I do it is I've hired two additional staff members and basically a probation officer that work every day, all day long, running the CATCH court program, being in on the treatment plans and team meetings. That's very labor intensive and management oriented.

Other courts, like there's a court in Pittsburgh, have just picked a treatment facility and gotten them to fund running the program. And they just basically have the women on probation to them. And then the outside organization is running their program. That's a great model if you have the right people and the right treatment team.

I like what we do because I get to feel like we're right on the front lines of designing and implementing state of the art changes so that we can come up with a best practice as we kind of have control over what the practices are so we can experiment and tweak our model until we can come up with something that works better and better.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
So going back a little bit, you talked about the often long history of trauma that women who come before the court may have. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

HERBERT:
Yeah. What you're going to find, you're going to find a basic background of 90 some percent of your women who go into prostitution, what happens to them, they just don't decide to do this. So basically, our numbers are showing that the average age of sexual abuse among our participants is eight and a half years old.

And then they traditionally try to report that to an adult that they trust like their mom in the home and mom usually doesn't act upon it. The abuse is at the hands of a relative or a stepfather or a boyfriend. Mom usually doesn't act on that. So it's not a real supportive home environment for this young person. Then they start to become a bad kid at school, their grades start to slip. They start to miss school, their attitude changes. They don't look up anymore. They're heads in their hands all the time. They start to display anxious, depressed type of moods.

They basically, then they start to get into a situation where they want to run away from home because this abuse continues. So they eventually run away from home. Our system is built to put them back in that home as soon as possible. We do that. The abuse continues. They run away again. We put them in foster care. Foster care is not equipped to deal with young people with sexual trauma like this and so that's a disaster.

The kid then usually winds up running away by the time they're 13 to 14 and a half years old. Then, within 72 hours of being on the street, these guys are out there and they're very, very good at what they do. They'll be looking for a girl with a backpack on, four o'clock and five o'clock in the afternoon. They know she hasn't been home. They swing by and ask her what's wrong. Someone could walk up and say, "Oh, you want to go shopping?" and they would probably say yes. And then, "Hey, do you want to go to a party? And give me your phone number?" And it just goes right from there.

So then four or five years in this lifestyle, this has basically leaves a woman with the most complicated problems. A matter of fact, she fits into almost every one of our social service bubbles, single parent with no skills. She's jobless, she's homeless, she's a domestic violence victim, she's got mental health issues, she's a drug addict, and she's got posttraumatic stress syndrome. So you've got all the major things there, but what's so glorious is she doesn't act like a defendant when she gets to you. She kind of acts just like somebody who's lost and wants to be helped.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
Well, thank you.

HERBERT:
Well, thank you. It sure was an honor to be on your program. Thank you.

POPE-SUSSMAN:
This has been Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation speaking with Judge Paul Herbert. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, visit www.courtinnovation.org.