Program defunded by Texas still helping prostitutes in Austin make a new life
A court-connected service program that lost its state funding last year owing to a dispute between Governor Greg Abbott and the county government has continued to serve prostitutes in Austin this year after the county stepped in to fill the funding gap, though the scope of the program appears to have narrowed.
The Phoenix Court is a service program for defendants who have been arrested in Travis County for misdemeanor prostitution charges and who want to change their life. People who successfully complete the program have their criminal charges dismissed.
From September 2015 until January 2017 the program was funded by a $214,00 grant from the governor’s office. The grant ended abruptly after the Travis County Sheriff adopted a policy to cease cooperation with federal immigration agents. Governor Abbott slashed $1.5 million in funding to Travis County as part of a zero-tolerance policy toward so-called “sanctuary cities.”
Travis County Commissioners Court heard testimony August 21 from county officials involved in running the scaled-back program, which has continued to serve women in Austin to help them stay off the streets and avoid prosecution on prostitution charges.
Torie Camp, an independent consultant who was hired by the county evaluate the program, testified that the program’s strength is in creating one-on-one relationships between the program’s case manager and the program clients who are trying to leave prostitution.
“The first two to three months of this program are really just about establishing trust and stabilizing somebody,” she said. “You’re not hoping to make a lot of treatment as far as creating coping skills or new job skills on those first few months because it’s really just about getting that person stabilized enough so they can start thinking straight about what their future might look like — what a new path could be.”
The Phoenix program then taps into other county and community resources to help clients, she explained.
Currently there are five clients in the program. Over the past year Phoenix Court has worked with 15–20 clients total, according to Tony Frank, Phoenix Court Case Manager. Some clients drop out and others are referred to programs elsewhere, he said.
The current caseload of five is down from the program’s one-time high of 14 clients, according to Mack Martinez, a Travis County attorney assigned to work with the Phoenix Court program.
Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt expressed concern that the program is currently serving only five people and in total has served fewer than 20 women this year. “It is an expensive proposition per client,” she said.
Martinez replied that the successes of the program needs to be measured more broadly than just the number of women in the program, pointing to instances where Phoenix Court helped women or girls who were not formally in the program, in some cases by making referrals to other programs or services, such as mental health programs.
The program currently has a budget of around $114,000 from the county. This is less than annual budget of $178,900 that was disclosed by a county official last year prior to the end of the governor’s grant. In February last year, Martinez told the Statesman that he feared for the program after the state cut off its funding.
Officials at the hearing did not speak to whether the loss of state funding has affected the program’s housing and drug rehabilitation efforts, some of which had been covered under the governor’s grant, though the evaluation report by Torie Camp identified housing as a significant challenge. “High need clients” and a lack of affordable, safe housing are the program’s biggest challenges, she said.
Camp urged county commissioners to consider the Phoenix program a good long-term investment toward the future of the county, citing benefits not just to the individuals in the program but to the community more broadly: “Investing in these types of clients, clients who have compounded trauma, clients who are not always easy to be around, folks on the street who you may not be excited to be sitting next to on the bus — investment in those people pays off in five years, in ten years, in fifteen years, when they are not being chronically hospitalized for drug overdoses, when police are not always being called out to violent scenes that they are associated with, and not only for the client but for their families as well.”
“For the families that have someone that’s on the streets and is prostituting themselves it is an incredibly stressful type of thing,” Camp added. “Having that person being off the streets and in a safe situation is an enormous relief to those families — whether it’s the parents of that person who has been participating in prostitution, or it’s the children of that person, who want their family member — who want their mom or their dad home with them and want to be able to love and see that person for who they really are.”
Texas counties with populations over 200,000 are required by state law to have prostitution courts under specialty statutes. According to case manager Frank, most of the women who have gone through the Travis County program suffer from drug addiction and many were sexually molested as children.
