By Lisa Cameron, Jennifer Seager, Manisha Shah

We examine the impact of criminalizing sex work, exploiting an event in which local officials unexpectedly criminalized sex work in one district in East Java, Indonesia, but not in neighboring districts. We collect data from female sex workers and their clients before and after the change. We find that criminalization increases sexually transmitted infections among female sex workers by 58 percent, measured by biological tests. This is driven by decreased condom access and use. We also find evidence that criminalization decreases earnings among women who left sex work due to criminalization, and decreases their ability to meet their children's school expenses while increasing the likelihood that children begin working to supplement household income. While criminalization has the potential to improve population STI outcomes if the market shrinks permanently, we show that five years post-criminalization the market has rebounded and the probability of STI transmission within the general population is likely to have increased.

Working Paper 27846

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020. 52p.

By Southern Poverty Law Center

Access to safe, stable housing is a human right. In the United States, however, the deprivation of this right leads to inequitable housing access. As a result, in addition to people with disabilities and members of the LGBTQ+ community, people of color — especially Black people — are more likely to experience homelessness or be at risk of homelessness. Compounding this issue, people of color and people with disabilities are also overrepresented in the criminal legal system because of mass incarceration. This intersection of housing inaccessibility and criminalization has resulted in the pernicious practice of the criminalization of people experiencing homelessness, a pressing issue across the country — including in the Deep South. In 2023, for example, Georgia enacted a law that forces cities and other localities to enforce bans on public camping, putting thousands of Georgians living unsheltered at risk of arrest for performing basic survival activities like rest, eating and asking for help.

Montgomery, AL Southern Poverty Law Center, 2024

By Jack Norton, Stephen Jones, Bea Halbach-Singh, Jasmine Heiss

When people are arrested and charged for activities they are forced to engage in to survive—such as driving without a license or sleeping outside—poverty becomes criminalized. In these cases, being poor is essentially made illegal. In collaboration with Free Hearts—an organization led by formerly incarcerated women—Vera researchers explain how poverty has been criminalized across Tennessee and what this means for people who live in communities in the state. The effects of the criminalization of poverty are compounded through the collection of money bail; additional fines, fees, and costs; and barriers to housing, transportation, education, and employment. With deep dives into several counties across Tennessee, the report shows how incarceration and policing are related to other systems that both punish and exacerbate poverty in the state. The report outlines actionable steps that can be taken now to build toward a vision of safety that includes all Tennesseans.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2022. 58p.

By Benjamin D. Scher , Scott D. Neufeld , Amanda Butler , Matthew Bonn , Naomi Zakimi , Jack Farrell , and Alissa Greer

In light of North America’s persisting drug toxicity crisis, alternative drug policy approaches such as decriminalization, legalization, regulation, and safer supply have increasingly come to the forefront of drug policy discourse. The views of people who use drugs toward drug policy and drug law reform in the Canadian context are essential, yet largely missing from the conversation. The aim of this study was to capture the opinions, ideas, and attitudes of people who use drugs toward Canadian drug laws and potential future alternatives. Methods: This paper was developed as part of the Canadian Drug Laws Project, a cross-jurisdictional qualitative study conducted in British Columbia, Canada between July and September 2020. The qualitative data are from 24 semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of people who use illegal drugs. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed thematically by the research team. Results: Two main themes and corresponding sub-themes are presented: (1) The experience of stigma as a consequence of criminalization; (2) The perceived benefits of drug law reform. Participants spoke in-depth about their experiences living within a criminalized drug policy context and offered suggestions for new pathways forward. Their perspectives illuminate how Canada’s drug laws may shape public attitudes toward people who use drugs and the consequent manifestations of structural, social, and self-stigma experienced by people who use drugs. Conclusion: Participants openly and profoundly believed that current drug laws produced and propagated the public attitudes and structural inequities experienced by people who use drugs in Canada. This matters, not only because our findings highlight the fact that people who use drugs experience stigma in tangible and clearly impactful ways, but it also suggests that the criminalization of drugs shapes the experience of structural, social, and self stigma. Finally, participants believed that efforts to destigmatize people who use drugs would be ineffectual without the enactment of more robust forms of drug law reform such as the decriminalization of illegal drugs.

Contemporary Drug Problems 1-24 © The Author(s) 2023

By The YWCA

Police killings of Black people and the ensuing nation-wide protests that swept across the United States during the spring and summer months of 2020 are certain to be recorded as defining elements of an unprecedented year. Like Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and so many others before them, the names of the people of color killed by police in 2020 are now seared into our national consciousness: George Floyd. Rayshard Brooks. Tony McDade. Breonna Taylor. Their deaths unleashed a national fury and ignited a long overdue reckoning with racial violence by police against people of color.

But as so often happens, women and girls of color are again being left out of the story. Their experiences? Overlooked and erased by a media and policy narrative that overwhelmingly focuses on men and boys of color.

Washington, DC: YWCA, 2020. 49p.

By Jennifer Turner

In the first-ever report on the extent and impact of cooperation between courts and the private debt collection industry nationwide, the American Civil Liberties Union found courts in 26 states and Puerto Rico in which judges issued arrest warrants for alleged debtors at the request of private debt collectors.

This practice violates the many state and federal laws as well as international human rights standards that prohibit the jailing of debtors. It worsens their financial struggles by subjecting them to court appearances, arrest warrants that appear on background checks, and jail time that interfere with their wages, their jobs, their ability to find housing, and more.

An estimated one in three adults in the United States has a debt that has been turned over to a private collection company, according to the Urban Institute. More than 6,000 of these companies operate in the U.S. At the bidding of the private debt collection industry, courts issue tens of thousands of arrest warrants every year when people don’t appear in court to deal with unpaid civil debt judgments.

New York: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 2018. 97p.