Roxbury rehab

A partnership between police, courts, and community activists aims to move prostitutes off the streets and into a self-help program

by Laura A. Siegel

REACHING OUT: "I used to live in the street, sleep in abandoned cars, eat out of dumpsters," says Linda Burston, who now works as an organizer and HIV outreach worker. "Now I talk to women who are my mirror."

It's past 2 a.m. on a Thursday night. I'm cruising around Roxbury in an unmarked police car with two plainclothes officers. We chase a getaway car the wrong way down one-way streets. We search for a red jeep containing the gunman from that night's shooting. The officers frisk suspects in an armed robbery and bust a guy smoking crack.

But I'm here to meet the prostitutes. Over the course of two chilly hours, we see at least six. The women wander up and down the sidewalks, under dim yellow lights.

We slow down, pull over to a pretty woman with gold earrings and a shy smile. I get out. "If you're on drugs, you want to get high, you come out here," Stephanie tells me. She shrugs. Turning tricks is nothing after so long. "You just think about getting paid," she says. The going rate is five dollars for a blow job -- half the cost of a hit of crack.

Open prostitution like this has plagued Roxbury for as long as anyone can remember -- it used to be even worse. On Blue Hill Avenue, prostitutes turn tricks in bushes, backyards, and cars. Condoms and syringes litter the sidewalk. Johns approach women waiting for the bus.

"Nighttime is awful," says Emilia Sanchez, a community organizer for Nuestra Comunidad Development Corporation, complaining of shouts and car horns outside her window. "They don't let us sleep."

Businesses that invest in the neighborhood suffer. Others never move in. "It's bad. They go up and down the street waving to guys," says Fernando Castillo, manager of F&F Auto Glass on Blue Hill Avenue. When prostitutes loiter in front of Gabriel Hernandez's barber shop, "I kick them out," he says. Still, "some customers don't come because of the prostitution in the area."

Parents fear that their children will learn from what they see. Debbie, another prostitute I talk to, says that's how she learned 10 years ago -- "from watching other females do it." Skinny, with bloodshot eyes and chipped black nail polish, Debbie wanders in the middle of the street, waving to a man. She lives in a shelter but says she'd rather be in an apartment, off drugs, and working in an office.

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Such a change -- leaving prostitution -- is hard to make. But it can be done. Linda Burston walked the streets for 20 years. "I started shooting dope at 15, going in and out of jail, having baby after baby," she says. "I used to live in the street, sleep in abandoned cars, eat out of dumpsters." Seven years ago she walked into a now-defunct rehab program called Women, Inc. and changed her life. As an HIV outreach worker, she says, "now I talk to women who are my mirror."

Burston also works with the Blue Hill Avenue & Dudley Street Merchants & Residents Association, which aims to make getting off the street easier. It's an unusual coalition made up of residents, merchants, and community agencies in the Blue Hill Avenue area, as well as police and court officials. Last week, the association gave the Roxbury District Court a final proposal for Project PIE -- Prostitution Impacted by Enforcement. Burston says she hopes Project PIE can help other women like her, and, in so doing, transform her neighborhood.

Project PIE will begin with the next sweep of prostitutes in Roxbury, when judges in the Roxbury District Court will for the first time sentence prostitutes to a 10-week program designed to help them turn their lives around. This emphasis on rehabilitation will signify a break with the past. "Police have done sweeps and gone undercover, only to see the courts put the prostitutes back out," says Viktor Theiss, Roxbury's assistant district attorney. The women would simply pay court costs and have their cases dismissed. This endless cycle frustrated police and residents.

"The courts weren't aware how serious the problem was considered by the people in the community," says Lieutenant Arthur Stratford, who has been deeply involved with Project PIE. Now, largely because of the efforts of the Merchants & Residents Association, judges are listening to what the community has to say.

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ADMINISTERING JUSTICE: "We all know how hard it can be to change life patterns," admits assistant district attorney Viktor Theiss. "This is the best start that I've seen."

The Association started developing the program a year and a half ago, when community organizers from Nuestra Comunidad asked local merchants to discuss their concerns. Prostitution topped the list, and so the organizers and merchants reached out to residents, agencies, the police, and the courts to pull together on the issue.

The association decided to work with the courts to put women arrested for prostitution into some kind of treatment program. Sanchez and probation officer Shannon Zlotnik coordinated the association's work and did research, but every member offered ideas and feedback as they worked out the details. They contacted other, similar programs to figure out how to handle various issues and learned about the subtleties of the criminal-justice system.

Last fall, the group held a rally to bring attention to its cause. It also issued a community-impact report, describing the effect prostitution has had on members' lives, which will be read aloud to prostitutes before sentencing. All the while, the members have been tweaking their proposal.

Now it's finally done, and here's how it will work: when prostitutes are arrested, judges now can compel them to attend a 10-week program of workshops called Reflections, either in exchange for dismissing their cases or as a condition of probation, and sometimes after a brief stint in jail to force them to detoxify. Though judges won't be obligated to assign the women to Reflections, "I think the judges will certainly cooperate and think it's consistent with doing justice," says First Justice Milton Wright of the Roxbury District Court.

An existing organization called Women Connecting Affecting Change (WCAC) will run the Reflections workshops, which aim to address the root causes of prostitution. Topics will include "self-esteem, anger/shame, guilt, stress management, addiction, relapse prevention, reproductive health, sexual orientation, HIV/AIDS and STDs, domestic violence, and spirituality," according to the Project PIE proposal.

"The root causes [of prostitution] are definitely childhood physical, sexual, and emotional abuse," says Yolani Dolmo, who will facilitate the workshops. Most prostitutes are addicted to drugs; many lack education and job training. They also have to deal with the stigma of prostitution. "One of my main goals is to raise their self-esteem," says Dolmo. "With that we'll be able to move mountains."

WCAC won't receive funding from the courts, but it is funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Boston Public Health Commission, and private groups. WCAC will refer the women to other services when the 10 weeks end and will record their continued progress. It also has a drop-in center where the prostitutes will be welcome -- in fact, most of the women the group now sees are prostitutes, and it has already helped several get off the streets. "They're making connections, they're developing healthy rapport, whether with probation officers or service providers," says Zlotnik. "We're giving them more tools."

WCAC will also make sure the women stick to the program. They may be summoned back to court after a few weeks; if WCAC says they've been skipping workshops, that's an offense that can get them placed on probation. Those already on probation will be watched closely and if necessary enrolled in other programs, such as residential substance-abuse programs, by the probation department. If they skip out again, they face harsher penalties.

But even women who get help often fall back into old habits later. "A lot of them out here, they go in a program and come back and do it all over again," says Ruby, a frail woman who claims she's not a prostitute -- she just has "boyfriends" who drive by and want to make love.

"We all know how hard it can be to change life patterns," admits assistant DA Theiss. Still, he says, "This is the best start that I've seen."

Burston, the ex-prostitute, knows women who have spent time in WCAC's drop-in center. "They've touched a few women already," she says. "It's more than we had before."

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Project PIE is the kind of initiative that has come out of Boston's recent focus on community policing -- a strategy in which citizens work with police to prevent crime, not just respond to it. That often means addressing the quality-of-life issues, such as prostitution, that make neighborhoods feel unsavory and that keep people off the streets -- thus making the neighborhoods even more dangerous.

But eliminating these problems isn't simple. Often the offenders are also neighborhood residents, explains Jack McDevitt, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University. The Roxbury community understands how the problems of residents and offenders are intertwined and "didn't want anything too punitive," says Lieutenant Stratford. "It wanted to help people first."

McDevitt says such an attitude is rare. "The immediate reaction for most communities is to get rid of" the prostitutes, he says. "This is a community that stepped forward and said, 'We want to heal the problem.' " That's where Roxbury differs from places such as Bay Village, where residents once proposed making prostitution a felony with sentences of up to 18 months in jail.

"It's very refreshing to have people who are more rehabilitation-minded," says Zlotnik. Information about similar programs elsewhere is scarce, but one often-cited model is Midtown Community Court in Manhattan, where prostitutes -- and other perpetrators of quality-of-life crimes -- receive sentences that combine community service and rehabilitative programs. Prostitution has dropped sharply in the area the court serves.

The Merchants & Residents Association is also unusual in its diversity -- it includes people from various races and backgrounds. Residents and business owners, members of housing groups and elderly centers, clergy and probation officers, high-ranking police officers and judges all work together with a high level of cooperation.

Next on the agenda: johns. As several members pointed out at the last meeting, prostitution wouldn't exist without men willing to buy sex. Though it's harder to catch and convict johns than prostitutes, everyone is eager to see them punished for the harm they're doing to the community, and to the women who walk its streets.

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We pull into an empty parking lot so I can meet Pat -- who has agreed to talk in exchange for a "courtesy" during the next police sweep. She's beautiful, delicate-boned, with one crooked tooth, her head wrapped in a turban. I ask her what she'd really like to be doing. She looks at me sideways. "That would take too long to answer," she says, stiffly. "So let's not talk about it." Her eyes are filled with tears.

Laura A. Siegel can be reached at lsiegel[a]phx.com.