Our Story
Brent Woody is an attorney licensed in Florida and Tennessee and the founder and executive director of the Justice Restoration Center (JRC). Since 2009, Brent has made it a personal mission to provide free legal services to victims and survivors of human trafficking. Understanding that individuals subjected to exploitation in the forms of forced labor, commercial sex acts, and domestic servitude had no means to obtain desperately needed legal services, Brent committed to never turning away a survivor with trafficking-related legal needs.
In 2012, Brent’s work for trafficking survivors and victims expanded as he began advocating before the Florida legislature for the rights of human trafficking survivors to petition a court for the expungement of criminal history records and vacating of criminal convictions for offenses that resulted from their exploitation. Unjust criminal history records and convictions close many doors for trafficking survivors, and this law was desperately needed. At that time, Brent already had two survivor/clients with such a need. Florida unanimously passed the human trafficking victim expungement law and the Governor signed it into law in 2013.
By the time the law took effect in January 2014, JRC had fifteen trafficking expungement clients. JRC now represents over 200 survivors from in and out of the state and from within the Florida inmate population. Legislatively, Brent has initiated and successfully advocated for, among other things, the elimination of the statute of limitations for human trafficking offenses, enhanced penalties for traffickers, enhanced penalties for sex-buyers, the non-criminalization of commercially sexually exploited minors, and exemptions from the public records laws for the locations of safe houses.
Funding the Mission
JRC provides pro bono restorative legal services that help empower survivors to live in freedom.
Paying for the work continues to be a challenge. That is not unusual in the human trafficking advocacy movement. Brent Woody, JRC’s founder and executive director, never imagined with two clients in 2012, that the work would grow to its current level. Initially, the work was funded primarily by Brent’s private law practice, but in 2015, unable to identify any Florida attorneys who were exclusively serving the trafficking survivor population, Brent closed down his private practice to give his full attention to his growing survivor client list. Brent and his wife, Pamela, never doubted their decision to serve in this way, no matter the cost. Funding for 2017 supported about 50% of JRC’s current operating expenses and 20% of the actual amount needed to fully serve its clients. Current funding sources are a combination of private donors, churches, and small non-government grants.