By Dr. Jarrod Sadulski
Faculty Member, Criminal Justice
Recently, an intelligence lieutenant from an all-women’s prison in northwest Pennsylvania contacted me, due to my experience with helping inmates at Belize Central Prison and testifying to Congress about human trafficking.
The intelligence lieutenant said that at his correctional facility, they had detected sex trafficking recruitment occurring both inside and outside the prison. He asked if human trafficking expert Ali Hopper and I, who co-founded a nonprofit, would come to the prison to aid a new anti-human trafficking committee.
What We Learned from Female Inmates about Human Trafficking
While spending a couple of days at this all-women’s prison, we interviewed many female inmates. Some of them were incarcerated for human trafficking crimes, while others were trafficking survivors.
In each case, Ms. Hopper and I discovered that all of the inmates convicted of human trafficking were human trafficking victims themselves. Many prisoners explained that the only way to escape a human trafficking situation was to recruit other girls to take their place.
We also learned that these female prisoners have family or friends go onto their old social media accounts, obtain pre-incarceration photos, and upload the images on pen pal websites. These websites are designed to connect female inmates with other people who wish to become their friends and share correspondence. Sadly, it is a first step in the grooming process of human traffickers.
What Is the Grooming Process and How Does It Work with Female Inmates?
For a human trafficker, the grooming process requires contacting a female inmate and exploiting any feelings or vulnerabilities that the victim may have. Often, these female inmates are lonely and depressed, and their future after release is uncertain due to their prison record.
Human traffickers exploit the vulnerability of these inmates. They convince a victim that they truly care and make false promises of future housing and employment. For those women whose only option is to return to marginalized communities with no money, the offer of post-prison help from these predators is tempting.
Ms. Hopper notes, “As a woman and as someone who has spent years studying trafficking, what struck me in these prison interviews was how often grooming began where trauma and unmet needs already existed. Many of these women endured abuse, abandonment, poverty, instability, or rejection, while still carrying the deeply human need for safety, belonging, love, identity, and hope.
“Through Maslow’s hierarchy, we can see how traffickers identified those vulnerabilities and offered themselves as the answer. That slowly turned the inmates’ grooming into coercive control, making the very things they promised as protection become the chains used to exploit these female inmates.”
Human Trafficking Prevention in Female Prisons
Many correctional facilities do not monitor female inmates for signs of human trafficking, and they do not train their inmates or employees how to recognize human traffickers. This problem in female prisons is nationwide and urgently needs to be addressed by prison administrators.
To combat human trafficking recruitment within female prisons, we must evaluate where true vulnerabilities exist and work to mitigate the risk. According to prison expert Peter Bludworth, there are scalable solutions to address this human trafficking trend.
Mr. Bludworth notes that “sexual abuse, coercion and exploitation inside correctional institutions are not new problems. What is changing is our ability to recognize many of these behaviors through the lens of human trafficking, which gives corrections an opportunity to refine the existing Prison Rape Elimination Act, intelligence, classification, and investigative practices to better identify victims, disrupt exploiters, and coordinate appropriate intervention and criminal reporting.”
Human traffickers often reach their prison victims through email or other electronic communication, depending upon the facility. Prison employees across the U.S. should be trained to monitor inmate communication, identify sex trafficking terminology and detect if inmates have been groomed by human traffickers.
Using AI software could be useful in this situation. It could assist with detecting keywords associated with grooming.
Prison administrators can also address human trafficking of female inmates through establishing policies that increase inmate protection and safeguard human rights. In addition, raising public awareness that human trafficking of female prisoners is a recurring issue is essential to reducing its prevalence nationwide.
About the Author
Dr. Jarrod Sadulski is an associate professor in the School of Security and Global Studies and has over 20 years in the field of criminal justice. He holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Thomas Edison State College, a master’s degree in criminal justice from American Military University, and a Ph.D. in criminal justice from Northcentral University.
His expertise includes training on countering human trafficking, maritime security, organized crime, and narcotics trafficking trends in Latin America. Jarrod has also testified to both the U.S. Congress and U.S. Senate on human trafficking and child exploitation. He has been recognized by the U.S. Senate as an expert in human trafficking.
Jarrod frequently conducts in-country research and consultant work in Central and South America on human trafficking and current trends in narcotics trafficking. He serves as an expert witness in criminology. Jarrod has provided academic presentations across the United States and in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America on various criminology-related topics. Also, he has a background in business development.
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