Human Trafficking: Misdirected Prosecution

The issue of human trafficking and forced prostitution is omnipresent in Season Two of The Wire, and David Simon offers a nuanced and thoughtful critique of the current supposedly-remedial policy of the law authorities on the issue.

The discovery of thirteen dead Eastern European girls in a shipping container, as well as the one found floating in the river by Detective McNulty, sets the scene for forthcoming episodes. Coming full-circle, in the final episode a montage shows that in spite of the former instigators of the trafficking having departed, new instigators step in to fill the void and the practice recommences, seemingly interrupted only momentarily.

We see early in the series that other Eastern European girls, who have also been trafficked illegally to the country, are imprisoned and as such face prosecution or deportation, when Bunk and Lester attempt unsuccessfully to extract information from them. Later, when Jimmy plays an undercover john in a successful string operation to expose the brothel, the girls forced to work there are arrested, along with some of the lower-level instigators who coordinate the day-to-day prostitution racket. In fact, the only actor involved in the entire sex trade who isn’t in some way criminalized in The Wire is the john that McNulty catches in order to get the phone number of one of these girls.

The fact that the practice is seen to continue at the end of the Season portrays current policing efforts as futile, and in particular the apportioning of blame to the girls themselves while ‘pardoning’ the men who engage in this practice. In 2007, the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force was established, and ever since ‘busted’ several prostitution rings in Baltimore, with a high profile case in September 2011. Yet, once again, those prosecuted here were the girls themselves, and who after all the victims in this modern-day slavery of human-trafficking. Evidently, Simons utilizes The Wire as a pay to criticize the current evidently inadequate and ineffective policy of criminalizing said girls, while simultaneously ‘pardoning’ the johns.