Race Matters Until It Doesn't Matter
sex trafficking, race, and the urgency of political deflection
The omissions and deflections speak loudest.
As I’ve been saying, Democrats in the California Assembly Public Safety Committee killed a bill yesterday that would have defined the sexual trafficking of children as a serious felony. Recorded video of the committee hearing was posted late last night, and you can watch the discussion of the sex trafficking bill here by fast-forwarding to 1:50:02 or so. It’s an extraordinary discussion.
Remember that the principal objection to the bill grew from the fact that it would make sex trafficking “strikable” — that is, it would make it subject to enhanced sentencing under the state’s Three Strikes law for serious and violent felonies. In a written staff analysis, committee members were warned that punishing traffickers more harshly by this avenue could lead to racial disparities: “Three Strikes has been proven to be applied in a manner that punishes Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people more severely than white people who commit similar acts.” And here’s where it gets interesting, because the committee took testimony from survivors of childhood sex trafficking. For example:
That’s childhood trafficking victim Odessa Perkins, the founder of a California organization that serves other survivors of childhood sex trafficking. I’m not going to summarize her testimony — just watch what she says, which is only a one-minute excerpt. The argument before the committee was that it’s cruel to harshly punish people who traffic children for sex, because it may disproportionately punish “Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people.” But the analysis that advanced that argument, which you can again read for yourself….
….didn’t address the topic of racial disparities among the victims of childhood sex trafficking, who somehow matter less than the offenders — who we’re worried about treating fairly.
Senator Shannon Grove, the Republican author of SB 14, made exactly this argument in her opening statement: “Black women and girls are at increased risk of being harmed and trafficked, and are disproportionately missing in the State of California. Human trafficking disproportionately affects racial minorities and members of society who come from poor socioeconomic backgrounds….The Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Human Trafficking in Los Angeles, California noted that fifty percent of domestic trafficking clients are black, and over ninety percent of the women in their emergency shelters program are black.”
So yes, the enhanced sentencing of people who repeatedly traffic children for sex would probably produce racial disparities in sentencing, because the victims and perpetrators are more likely to be black. How unfair. Obviously, trafficked children need to be more scrupulous about being sold and raped by a racially diverse group of criminals. Society needs the balance.
Grove also presented testimony from a longtime sex crimes prosecutor, Sharmin Bock, who explained that the current twelve-year sentence for the trafficking of a minor described in the written analysis of the bill is the top of the sentencing range in existing law, and the least likely sentence. In reality, she said, circumstance-dependent sentencing happens along the lines of a “triad” of possible sentences: 5 / 8 / 12. And in California, a five-year prison sentence often means about two years in prison:
“So now you sell a child for sex and you’re getting like two.” That’s where California is.
Finally, related to Bock’s testimony, a remarkable assumption in the written analysis centers on the deterrent value of enhanced sentencing:
Increased Penalties and Lack of Deterrent Effect: The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has looked into the concept of improving public safety through increased penalties. As early as 2016, the NIJ has been publishing its findings that increasing punishment for given offenses does little to deter criminals from engaging in that behavior.
This is a poorly articulated psychological argument: does the criminal change his course of action because he fears punishment? But of course the argument about letting a sex trafficker out of prison after two years isn’t about the likelihood that you’ve psychologically deterred him from engaging in that behavior through the application of disincentives; rather, the argument is that a trafficker in prison for a long time isn’t physically able to engage in trafficking because he isn’t circulating in a community with children.
There’s more to say about this hearing, but it begins to feel like I’m saying that we haven’t eaten all the shit on our plate. Full video is at the link at the top. Discussion among committee members was so repellent that I decline to get into much of it, but you can scroll to 2:28:30 in the linked video to watch Democratic Assemblyman Isaac Bryan complain that sex trafficking is happening in black communities because of an absence of social programs and free stuff: “The same communities that have the highest rates of human trafficking are the same communities that have the highest unemployment rates, the highest rent burdens, the lowest amount of small businesses owned, the highest economic burdens in our state. But instead of investing the resources to take away the economic incentives and these kind of illicit markets, we invest all of these resources in our fifteen-billion-dollar-plus prison infrastructure.” Tremendously cruel of society to victimize adults by making them have to sell children for sex, you see.
The hearing has been covered elsewhere, and here are stories at the Washington Free Beacon, Fox News Los Angeles, KCRA Sacramento, the California Globe, and RedState.
The author of SB 14, Shannon Grove, is negotiating with Assembly leaders in an effort to get SB 14 to the floor for a vote without a committee referral. If you're interested and you're on Twitter, follow this KCRA reporter:
https://twitter.com/ZavalaA
She's been breaking all of the news on this bill.
I've read a fair amount of the history and theory of law. Often laws are created not just to criminalize and punish an offense against the public good but to avoid the chaos that may ensue if members of the community take it upon themselves to punish the offense.
If I were a criminal I'd be uneasy with the march of increased leniency and the reduction in police budgets. Eventually members of the community will take direct action against certain crimes and they will very likely be unconstrained by things like the presumption of innocence or the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
Some members of the public will eventually just force safety on their streets at the cost of a few thieve's hands and rapists' genitals. That approach preceded the modern machinery of law and will reemerge in the absence of its reasonable administration.