Policing Victimhood: Human Trafficking, Frontline Work, and the Carceral State

By Corinne Schwarz

Since the turn of the twentieth century, human trafficking has animated public discourses, policy debates, and moral panics in the United States. Though some nuances of these conversations have shifted, the role of the criminal legal system (police officers, investigators, lawyers, and connected service providers) in anti-trafficking interventions has remained firmly in place. Policing Victimhood explores how frontline workers in direct contact with vulnerable, exploited, and trafficked persons—however those groups are defined at personal, organizational, or legal levels—defer to the tools of the carceral state and ideologies of punishment when navigating their clients’ needs.
 
In Policing Victimhood, Corinne Schwarz interviewed with service providers in the Midwestern US, a region that, though colloquially understood as “flyover country,” regularly positions itself as a leader in state-level anti-trafficking policies and collaborative networks. These frontline workers’ perceptions and narratives are informed by their interpersonal, day-to-day encounters with exploited or trafficked persons. Their insights underscore how anti-trafficking policies are put into practice and influenced by specific ideologies and stereotypes. Extending the reach of street-level bureaucracy theory to anti-trafficking initiatives, Schwarz demonstrates how frontline workers are uniquely positioned to perpetuate or radically counter punitive anti-trafficking efforts.
 
Taking a cue from anti-carceral feminist critiques and critical trafficking studies, Schwarz argues that ongoing anti-trafficking efforts in the US expand the punitive arm of the state without addressing the role of systemic oppression in perpetuating violence. The violence inherent to the carceral state—and required for its continued expansion—is the same violence that perpetuates the exploitation of human trafficking. In order to solve the “problem” of human trafficking, advocates, activists, and scholars must divest from systems that center punishment and radically reinvest their efforts in dismantling the structural violence that perpetuates social exclusion and vulnerability, what she calls the “-isms” and “-phobias” that harm some at the expense of others’ empowerment. Policing Victimhood encourages readers to imagine a world without carceral violence in any of its forms.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978833326

Book preview

Cover Page for Policing Victimhood

Policing Victimhood

Critical Issues in Crime and Society

Raymond J. Michalowski and Luis A. Fernandez, Series Editors

Critical Issues in Crime and Society is oriented toward critical analysis of contemporary problems in crime and justice. The series is open to a broad range of topics including specific types of crime, wrongful behavior by economically or politically powerful actors, controversies over justice system practices, and issues related to the intersection of identity, crime, and justice. It is committed to offering thoughtful works that will be accessible to scholars and professional criminologists, general readers, and students.

For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

Policing Victimhood

Human Trafficking, Frontline Work, and the Carceral State

Corinne Schwarz

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey

London and Oxford

Rutgers University Press is a department of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, one of the leading public research universities in the nation. By publishing worldwide, it furthers the University’s mission of dedication to excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and clinical care.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schwarz, Corinne, author.

Title: Policing victimhood : human trafficking, frontline work, and the carceral state / Corinne Schwarz.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2023] | Series: Critical issues in crime and society | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022056582 | ISBN 9781978833302 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978833319 (hardcover ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978833326 (epub) | ISBN 9781978833333 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Human trafficking—United States. | Social work with human trafficking victims—United States. | Human trafficking victims—United States.

Classification: LCC HQ281 .S298 2023 | DDC 364.15/510973—dc23/eng/20230117

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056582

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2023 by Corinne Schwarz

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

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Contents

Introduction: Oh, Trafficking? That Happens Here? Perceptions and Paradigms of Anti-trafficking Efforts and the Carceral State

1 Carceral Protectionism: Resource Constraints and Rescue Narratives

2 The Punishment Mindset: The Inevitability of Carcerality

3 Therapeutic Governance and the Regulation of the Post-trafficking Self

4 Limits to Justice: The Complications of the Carceral State

5 Beyond Carceral Logics: Shifting from the Punishing State to the Helping State

Conclusion: Anti-trafficking Futures: Justice without Policing and Prisons

Acknowledgments

Appendix A: Research Methodologies

Appendix B: Interviewee Pseudonyms

Notes

References

Index

About the Author

Policing Victimhood

Introduction

Oh, Trafficking? That Happens Here?

Perceptions and Paradigms of Anti-trafficking Efforts and the Carceral State

February 15, 2017: I waited to begin an interview with Rose, a retired victim services coordinator. Because she no longer worked in a traditional office, though still deeply connected to the network of anti-trafficking advocacy in her midwestern state, we had to find a public space to conduct our interview.¹ Rose picked a diner; I was a bit on edge, since a previous interview in a coffee shop had led to an uncomfortable confrontation with a patron who kept encroaching on our shared table. I was relieved to sit in a booth but too nervous to order anything besides coffee.

In the moment, the interview went according to plan, following the rhythm and routine I had been able to cultivate over fourteen earlier interviews. Rose’s answers always returned to the importance of criminal legal systems in anti-trafficking work, which culminated in her explanation of why mandatory reporting needed to become a bigger, more deeply embedded part of anti-trafficking advocacy practices:

A lot of the victims use [. . .] services for domestic violence. [. . .] It’s a difference of ideology, if you wanna say that. You know, they say, Well, we’re victim-centered, which means the victim makes the decision whether they wanna file charges or not. I understand that in domestic violence. I don’t think human trafficking should fall in that same component. Because human trafficking, if in fact it’s a true trafficked victim, there may be five to ten girls that are affected by the actions of that perpetrator. And so, when that victim is afforded the choice of not reporting, we’re not helping those other five to twenty victims. We’re not helping. We are turning our backs on those other five to twenty women. [. . .] And a domestic violence shelter will say, Oh, honey, you don’t have to file to a report because they don’t do anything anyway. [. . .] And I think it needs to be a requirement within every organization that’s getting human trafficking funding [. . .], that you mandatory report the crime. (interview 2/15/17)

I did not push back here, a reality that still feels uncomfortable to admit, even though I did not completely agree with Rose’s perspectives on fellow antiviolence advocates or mandatory reporting policies. In conducting these interviews, I wanted to understand how people engaged in anti-trafficking work, regardless of the ideologies or political frames they brought to their jobs. I knew I would be encountering what I considered more common viewpoints on trafficking, ones that often centered on punishment and prosecution as centrally important. And while I was beginning to question the primacy of those narratives, it felt somehow wrong to address this in the middle of a formal interview. But there was something here—this explicit denial of victim-survivors’ expressed desires, this dismissal of the limitations of law enforcement responses—that stuck out differently to me.²

Upon leaving our interview, held in a suburban strip mall, I paused in the parking lot of a nearby big box store before driving home. This pause was a necessary part of my transition from interview to road; I would jot down more notes or record a voice memo to myself debriefing the conversation while the words were still fresh in my head. But on this day, I had to first stop to collect myself and my racing thoughts. Throughout the interview, Rose’s ideological orientations toward sex work, human trafficking, and the carceral state were not surprising to hear, given her work was nestled within a law enforcement agency. But other dissonances, specifically between her conceptual framing of victimhood and her description of frontline service provision, unsettled me.

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Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit someone for labor or commercial sex, including those under the age of eighteen engaged in commercial sexual exchanges, more commonly referred to as domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST).³ The fairly straightforward definition presented here masks the contention and confusion embedded in both its creation (Kinney 2006; Wijers and Quirk 2021) and its current application (Schwarz 2019). Human trafficking is often assumed to be exclusively sexual in nature, reinforced by the continued conflation of sex work with sex trafficking and the heightened public spotlight on cases involving sexual exploitation (Bhavnani and Schneider 2014). Similarly, as late capitalism deepens economic inequalities, the line between a bad job and labor exploitation that legally falls into trafficking gets thinner and thinner (Quirk, Robinson, and Thibos 2020).

In the midwestern United States, a complicating layer to this definition is the larger impression of human trafficking as simply not occurring in certain regions. Much awareness-generating activity in the Midwest has sought to establish that human trafficking happens, full stop. For example, the Human Trafficking Initiative of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office provides a range of awareness materials on its website. At the bottom of the page, viewers can find a set of three posters for public distribution. Each poster uses the same image of a globe, glowing blue and pictured as if the viewing audience is above in outer space. Ohio is marked by a red dot, identical to the image used to denote a destination in Google Maps. Even though this image remains consistent across all three posters, the text varies slightly, offering different slogans and conjuring different affective responses. The first in the series, pictured here, emphasizes a collaborative response to combat this social injustice, a complex problem in our communities that touches Ohio’s borders even if regular citizens cannot see it.

1. Awareness poster from Ohio Attorney General’s Office, Human Trafficking Initiative (Ohio Attorney General’s Office n.d.)

Campaigns like this seek to establish that human trafficking does happen, even in flyover states where trafficking is not imagined to occur. Unlike the plot devices of movies like Taken, which feature young women from some vaguely realized urban city being sold into sexual slavery abroad (Haynes 2014), or the sensationalism of vigilante groups like Operation Underground Rescue, whose tales of rescue frame trafficking as a problem exclusive to the developing world (Marchman and Merlan 2021), campaigns like this place trafficking into an individual’s corner of the world. If trafficking can happen even in Ohio, viewers must join the fight that threatens their region, their community, and their neighbors.

In addition to the sheer existence of human trafficking in the Midwest, the larger tropes that influence anti-trafficking efforts also appear in this region. Specifically, the power of the carceral state and its mechanisms of detention and incarceration resonate here as they do across the United States (Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014; Musto 2016; Shih 2016) and internationally (Chuang 2014; Plambech 2014; Vanderhurst 2017). Human trafficking is almost universally framed as a social justice or humanitarian problem that can only be solved with punitive solutions, and this framework repeats itself in the Midwest. The structural violence of poverty, social stigmas, and regressive policies, though well known and articulated by many of the service providers I interviewed, is secondary to the perceived need for judgment, punishment, and accountability.

In Policing Victimhood, I make two interventions in the scholarship on human trafficking. First, I explicitly connect the fields of critical trafficking studies and street-level bureaucracy theory (SLBT) to better understand the role of service provision in both undercutting and perpetuating the anti-trafficking status quo. While much research has analyzed the role of service providers in anti-trafficking efforts (Brennan 2014a; Farrell, Owens, and McDevitt 2014; Lutnick 2016; Musto 2013; 2016; Peters 2015; Shih 2016), few scholars have used Michael Lipsky’s foundational framework to assess in-depth how frontline workers effectively create anti-trafficking policy on the ground through their encounters with trafficked persons (Anasti 2020a; 2020b; Hoag 2010; Leser, Pates, and Dölemeyer 2017; Loyens and Maesschalck 2014).⁴ Lipsky (2010) argues those individuals who work in client-facing, direct service provision—educators, law enforcement officers, case managers, lawyers, to name only a few—exercise wide discretion in decisions about citizens with whom they interact. Then, when taken in concert, their individual actions add up to agency behavior (13). Anti-trafficking legislation may be made in statehouses or congressional offices, and organizational mandates may be formulated after beta testing and board approval, but their real effects manifest in disparate ways at the person-to-person level.

Second, this book takes seriously the need to think beyond carceral approaches to anti-trafficking efforts. We are at a historical and social moment where robust conversations about decarceration and decriminalization are entering the mainstream discourse, turning away from carceral approaches that perpetuate violence and stigmatization (Albright and D’Adamo 2017). However, these transformative efforts coexist alongside problematic impulses to implement End Demand policies within individual organizations and larger legal jurisdictions (Berger 2012; Bernstein 2012; Majic 2017; Vanwesenbeeck 2017), which use the Nordic model popularized in Sweden to arrest those who purchase commercial sex, driving those who sell sex into increasingly fraught and dangerous environments (Vuolajärvi 2019).

Taking up the call positioned within critical trafficking studies, critical criminology, and sex workers’ rights movements to eradicate the structural inequalities that produce marginalization and exploitation, I join their efforts to frame the carceral state itself as a harmful system. The fight to stop human trafficking requires the dismantling of policing and imprisonment as we currently know it, alongside poverty, housing insecurity, identity-based stigmas, and restrictive migration policies that collectively induce precarity and vulnerability. Maintaining gender-responsive or victim-centered programs—kinder, gentler mechanisms of carceral control (Musto 2019; Whalley and Hackett 2017)—for trafficked persons simply perpetuate the misguided positioning of the criminal justice system as the neoliberal gatekeeper of social services (Heiner and Tyson 2017, 3).

Frontline workers in the anti-trafficking arena are key stakeholders in this reframing. As Leah Jacobs et al. (2020) powerfully write in the wake of the 2020 murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, institutional commitments to punishment—from explicit collaborations with police to more implicit forms of social control—must be dismantled within the social work sector. These practices simply replicate systemic inequalities and harms in a smaller, frontline-level context. While they write from the perspective of a single professional field, critiquing what they call carceral social work, their claims can apply more broadly to frontline workers engaged in work coded as social justice or humanitarianism (and thus problematically neutral [Dadusc and Mudu 2022]), like anti-trafficking service providers. Carceral social work involves everyday practices of violence (Jacobs et al. 2020, 40) masked as mundane bureaucratic routines. This deeply resonates in the space of mainstream anti-trafficking service provision, which can involve similar client-facing practices emphasizing surveillance and scrutiny, as well as judgments rooted less in an understanding of clients’ self-expressed needs and more in a stigmatizing perception of their identity as deviant or transgressive.

Importantly, this everyday violence is not inherently static or stable. Repeating these patterns over and over may make them appear crystallized, but service providers are in a unique place to push against these standardized routines. Even though their work is mediated by personal ethics, organizational standards, professional codes of conduct, and state or federal legislation, frontline workers have the agency to find wiggle room in the gaps and overlaps of these policies—and the discretion baked into their role (Lipsky 2010) can be a site of compliance with carceral norms or creative resistance.

In the following sections, I will first summarize the two major theoretical frameworks that inform this research to better understand the roles of service providers and anti–human trafficking efforts: critical trafficking studies and SLBT. If, as Laura Agustín (2007) persuasively argues, the processes of identifying potentially trafficked persons and directing them to resources can be conceptualized as a rescue industry, then these two theories allow us to interrogate how anti-trafficking service provision is affected by stereotypical perceptions of victimhood and why frontline workers use their discretion in ways that may perpetuate a constrained understanding of justice, even with protection and care at the forefront of their stated missions.

To further contextualize these theories, I place them in the history of feminist antiviolence projects that intentionally or inadvertently use the mechanisms of the carceral state. Anti–human trafficking interventions share many commonalities with the patterns of punishment, management, and control found in state responses to domestic violence, rape, and sexual harassment (Thuma 2019). These carceral approaches are compounded even further by the long reach of the white slave panics at the turn of the twentieth century, which shaped the construction of human trafficking as a legal and moral phenomenon (Doezema 1999; Donovan 2006).

I then briefly introduce my qualitative research methodology, taking particular care to explain why the Midwest is such an instructive case study to interrogate anti-trafficking interventions. Finally, I provide an overview of each chapter of Policing Victimhood, which explores a different facet of anti-trafficking frontline work from an anticarceral feminist, critical trafficking studies perspective. As well, my conclusion offers a set of creative frameworks for thinking about new practices to affirm victim-survivors and address the root causes of exploitation and trafficking beyond the mechanisms of the carceral state. I do not seek to eradicate the role of frontline workers in this field, nor do I attempt to replace the punitive hand of the state with a caring yet still surveilling, managing hand (Bourdieu 1999). Rather, if street-level bureaucrats have the discretionary power to create policy on the ground, they have the potential to subvert anti-trafficking norms and shift away from policing client compliance to meeting individuals’ self-expressed needs from a more holistic, less punitive perspective.

Linking Theoretical Frames: From Trafficking to Street-Level Bureaucracies

Critical Trafficking Studies

While anti–human trafficking service provision is ostensibly about victim-survivors’ material conditions—assisting individuals who experienced trauma and had their autonomy compromised—these efforts are also shaped by broader assumptions about trafficking. Frontline workers encounter trafficked clients in a larger social climate where human trafficking is often sensationalized, stereotyped, and conceptualized differently across fields of scholarship, policy, and outreach (Chapkis 2003; Chuang 2014; Kinney 2006; Musto 2009). Thus, critical trafficking studies provides a necessary theoretical framework for understanding and pushing against the norms that frame service providers’ encounters with trafficked persons.

Jennifer Musto (2013) coined the phrase critical trafficking studies to describe a field of scholarship that seeks to dismantle and disrupt the dominant frames used to define human trafficking. She writes, What is ‘critical’ about critical trafficking studies is its theoretical consideration of that which is elided, concealed, and obfuscated in dominant scholarly treatment of the issue (261). Critical trafficking scholars interrogate the focus on human trafficking as almost exclusively sex trafficking of young women with heightened attention to the violence enacted upon these victim-survivors (Brennan 2014a; Chapkis 2003; Kempadoo 2015; Lutnick 2016; Skilbrei and Tveit 2008; Srikantiah 2007; Ticktin 2008), while labor trafficking and other forms of exploitation are left underrepresented or poorly defined (Brennan 2014b; Global Alliance against Traffic in Women 2019; Hafiz and Paarlberg 2017; Howard 2014). Critical trafficking studies demonstrates how commonly held definitions of human trafficking are shaped by cultural norms, societal hierarchies, political ideologies, and organizational missions. Even though legislation establishes terminology for human trafficking, these concepts are not deployed neutrally (Chapkis 2003; Kempadoo 2015). Frontline workers use a range of definitions when engaged in anti-trafficking work that may utilize legislative understandings pulled directly from the text of a policy or moral perceptions rooted in dominant social constructions (Schwarz 2019).

One major concern with the dominant anti-trafficking discourse is its reliance on very descriptive retellings of violence and trauma, what Wendy Chapkis (2003) describes as the gothic portrayals of sex trafficking (930). These narratives detail extreme sexual violations in graphic, attention-grabbing terms, creating an assumption that all forms of human trafficking look identically violent and traumatic. As Elizabeth Bernstein (2007) writes, with respect to anti–sex trafficking and anti–sex work activism, Reputable accounts by sex-worker activists and by researchers, including those based in the third world, suggest that the scenarios of overt abduction, treachery, and coercion that abolitionists depict are the exception rather than the norm (131). Even if empirical data support a critical trafficking studies understanding of diverse, nuanced, contextual forms of exploitation (Weitzer 2007), the reductive, dominant narrative persists in the public discourse and influences frontline workers engaged in anti-trafficking efforts. This frame also generates outrage and moral concern for a particular form of human trafficking—what may be legally considered aggravated human trafficking for sexual exploitation—while leaving in place policies that continue to punish the majority of ‘ordinary’ abused and exploited migrants (Chapkis 2003, 930). In emphasizing the most extreme exceptions to the rule, other, less salacious forms of trafficking slip through the cracks or get reinterpreted as criminalized acts of smuggling or undocumented immigration (Chuang 2014; FitzGerald 2010; Peters 2013).

In addition to these tropes of extreme violence, dominant anti-trafficking narratives mobilize race in stereotypical ways, perpetuating problematic connections between criminality and communities of color (Bumiller 2008; Crenshaw 2012; Soss and Weaver 2017). Human trafficking is often simplistically framed as a problem between older men of color exploiting young women. These young, feminized women are parsed into two limiting constructions: the white American (Baker 2014; Small 2012) or the woman of color assumed to originate from beyond the United States (Kempadoo 2015; Shih 2021b; Srikantiah 2007). This binary framework restricts the discourse in such a way that victim-survivors who cannot fit into these racialized categories are underrepresented and subsequently may not be able to access—or be explicitly excluded from—services and assistance (Howard 2014; Lutnick 2016).

As well, critical trafficking studies critiques the role of law enforcement and criminal legal processes in the dominant human trafficking discourse. Annie Hill (2016) describes this as the master narrative of trafficking: a singular focus on using carceral apparatuses, such as law enforcement raids and sting operations, for identifying and rescuing young female victim-survivors of sex trafficking. This narrative tell[s] a moral story that excites a desire to resolve a conflict between good and evil by establishing audience expectations that the police will stop the traffickers and save the girl(s) (Hill 2016, 41). The master narrative is, at its core, a traditional good guys versus bad guys tale, reinterpreted through the lens of trafficking. In many cases, the assumption of trafficking is enough to validate deploying this narrative, leading to a continued, often harmful conflation of sex work and sex trafficking.⁵

This reliance on normative tropes—the police officer as savior, the ostensibly trafficked sex worker in need of rescue—masks the real violence, disruption, and trauma that can come from these criminal legal interventions (Bernstein 2012; D’Adamo 2016; Grant 2014; 2019; Schwarz, Kennedy, and Britton 2017). Hill (2016) discusses how this approach disproportionately targets sex workers—some of whom are migrants at risk of deportation—who are assumed to be victims of exploitation and trafficking. When their status as sex workers is revealed, they are immediately categorized as criminal actors and subject to the punitive force of the carceral state. This example is not designed to risk equating sex work with sex trafficking but to highlight the damages of this conflation beyond the rhetoric of commercial sex. As Hill (2016) continues, Sex workers fear raids, experience trauma during raids and endure myriad harms in the aftermath of raids, which can include interrogation, detention, prosecution and deportation (42). Similarly, Musto’s (2013) critique of the detention to prosecution pipeline for youth suspected of being DMST victim-survivors reconsiders the common practice of arresting and detaining youth engaged in survival sex, exchanging sex to meet basic needs like shelter, food, and other fundamentals. State interventions, particularly interventions rooted in the carceral power of law enforcement, can carry consequences, even if the ultimate goal fits into the master narrative’s guiding concepts of saving and rescuing.

Street-Level Bureaucracy Theory

Service providers engaged in anti-trafficking work must use their own judgments—informed by organizational practices, individual moral codes, and the aforementioned dominant human trafficking discourse—to determine whether or not they are engaging with a trafficked person. These judgments may be revised with the addition of new information or new layers of interpersonal contact, but they also influence the initial and ongoing dynamics between frontline workers and their clients. SLBT provides a framework for understanding these processes with respect to direct, frontline engagement with clients. I employ Steven Maynard-Moody and Shannon Portillo’s (2010) formulation of street-level bureaucracy as theory for its coherent set of observations and principles that have led to a wide range of empirical studies and have been confirmed and generalized (254). SLBT interrogates the role of service providers in disseminating resources, engaging with clients, and mobilizing policy at the frontlines. Lipsky (2010) defines street-level bureaucrats as public service workers who interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs, and who have substantial discretion in the execution of their work (3). These workers come from a range of sectors, from law enforcement to education and health care, but are all intimately engaged with clients in direct, personal engagement. Conversely, managers and administrators do not generally have the same interpersonal encounters with citizens, as they are largely more distanced from direct work, responsible for overseeing daily operations, filing paperwork, or interacting with higher-level organizational stakeholders.

One of the most critical contributions of SLBT is the concept of discretion. Lipsky (2010) defines discretion as frontline workers’ freedom in determining the nature, amount, and quality of benefits and sanctions provided by their agencies (13). Later scholars of SLBT have offered their own nuances on discretion. For example, Martha S. Feldman (1992) describes it as the legitimate right to make choices based on one’s authoritative assessment of a situation (164). Vincent Dubois (2014) sees discretion as the leeway of officials in the enforcement of rules or implementation of programs (39). Contrary to the negative connotations of bureaucracy, frontline workers are not procedurally, robotically disseminating or withholding services. Rather, they are actively making meaning of their work, the clients they encounter, and their own identity as a frontline worker through the tools at their disposal. These discretionary practices accumulate to constitute organizational policy (Lipsky 2010).

Importantly, discretion is not reckless or random—it involves decision-making within a structure of rules (Feldman 1992, 164). Additionally, its value can change on a case-by-case basis. Evelyn Z. Brodkin (1997) states, Discretion is axiomatically neither good nor bad but contingent on contextual conditions (4). If a frontline worker is pressed for time, faced with limited resources, or simply finds a client’s appeals unconvincing, their discretionary latitude may facilitate a negative response for a client. This response could shift toward a positive result if one of these factors changed, such as an extra thirty minutes to spend on a client’s case.

Street-level bureaucrats use their knowledge of rules and procedures in tandem with their discretionary practices—the stereotypes they have accumulated about their client base; the scripts they have acquired through years of service; the moral codes built into their organizational infrastructure or inherent to their own belief systems; the in-person social cues provided by their client—to understand their clients and subsequently deliver services. Discretion is inherent to frontline work, given the need for timely judgments in the face of overwhelming caseloads and limited budgets, so managerial attempts to restrict these decision-making practices can only displace it. Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno (2003) describe discretion as putty, squeezed by oversight and rules but never eliminated (10). Eliminating discretion in one facet of work only displaces it to another sector or form of decision-making.

In more recent scholarship on SLBT, discretion has been pushed and reframed as a more agentic process of meaning making. For example, Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2012) use the term agency in their analysis of frontline workers’ decisions on justice and equity. This subtle shift aides in depicting workers as state centered and culture centered in rendering their judgments (S18). In this formulation, judgments are contingent on not simply the discretionary practices of frontline work contained to that particular organization but also their contextual knowledge of social scripts and positioning that come from interacting with the world at large. Accordingly, they have a degree of latitude in their judgments outside of the standards set by their workplace or organizational standards, so long as the expressions of this latitude do not transgress specific, juridical bounds or result in a visible negative result (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2012, S18). As Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2012) explain further, "Thus, expressions of street-level agency most frequently conserve established cultural