Luzerne County is located in central Pennsylvania, and the city of Wilkes Barre is the county seat and population center. Other relatively populous communities  within the county include Hazleton, Kingston, Nanticoke, and Pittston. The region has well-documented history of sex trafficking and prostitution activity. The county contained towns that were stops on a domestic sex trafficking circuit in the 1970s and 1980s. The “pimp circuit,” as it was then called, ran along highway corridors in central Pennsylvania (e.g., Allentown, Reading, Harrisburg, Scranton, Wilkes Barre) and upstate New York (Schenectady, Albany, Buffalo). Like in most areas, there is also a long history of local street prostitution, and commercial sex advertised online and occurring anywhere within Luzerne County. There is evidence of prostitution and sex trafficking still occurring in the city. For example, in December 2013, two men were charged in federal court for their roles as part of an underage prostitution ring. The men were part of a group of five alleged sex traffickers/pimps (or more accurately, child sex traffickers) who prostituted underage girls and advertised their services through photos on a website. The two Pittston residents were indicted by a federal grand jury in Scranton on charges of sex trafficking of children and producing and distributing child pornography, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. The men conspired to recruit at least three minor females — and attempted to recruit a fourth — to engage in prostitution in Luzerne, Lackawanna and Dauphin counties. The men used cell phones to produce and transmit images of child pornography or child sexual abuse material -(CSAM), which were used in “escort services” online advertisements, rented motel rooms for sex buyers to meet with minors to sexually exploit them, and shared in the profits of the prostitution activities. The men were charged with conspiracy to commit sex trafficking, sex trafficking of children, conspiracy to produce child pornography, three counts of production of child pornography, one count of conspiracy to transport and ship child pornography, and three counts of transporting and shipping child pornography. In 2016, a woman in Harvey’s Lake faced prostitution and drug charges for advertising commercial sex (prostitution) online to support a drug habit, and also trafficking drugs. The investigation began when a landlord told police suspicious activity. Police investigated, and found bags of heroin and syringes filled with heroin, or empty syringes, all over the home.

An effort to aggressively tackle consumer-level demand in the 1980s and early 1990s in Wilkes Barre appeared to have been successful, and depressed the market for purchased sex to the point that the city was taken off the domestic sex trafficking circuit. In interviews conducted for the National Assessment, police department staff said that through the mid-1980s, traditional interventions had been tried and found ineffective: arresting prostituted women accomplished little (trafficked women soon left for the next stop on the circuit, and local women simply returned to the streets), and prosecution of sex traffickers/pimps had been attempted, but never successfully. In 1986, Wilkes-Barre police tried a new approach, conducting large-scale reverse stings coupled with publicizing the identities of arrestees. In each of the first several operations, they arrested from 50 to 100 men who were issued citations and ordered to pay fines. Arrestee identities were included in press releases which ran in the local Sunday newspaper. After two years of these efforts, police concluded that Wilkes-Barre had been taken off the “pimp circuit.” According to the police department, the combination of reverse stings and identity disclosure removed Wilkes-Barre from a domestic trafficking circuit, and reduced the number of women engaged in street prostitution locally by 75%. The number of women known to engage in street prostitution fell from 20 to five, with the rotating circuit survivors gone and the remaining five being local women suffering from severe substance addictions.

More recently, smaller scale reverse stings have continued to be conducted. For example, in May 2016, four men were arrested for trying to patronize prostituted women in Wilkes-Barre Township, the Luzerne County District Attorney’s Office announced. Investigators posted an advertisement on the internet over the Memorial Day holiday weekend and the four men contacted undercover officers to make arrangements for the exchange of sex for money. The defendants were identified in news releases. The arrests were the result of a joint investigation by the Luzerne County District Attorney’s Office, Wilkes-Barre Township Police Department, Pennsylvania State Police and detectives from the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office.

In the third annual Report on Commercial Sexual Exploitation in Pennsylvania by Villanova University’s Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation (CSE Institute), it was reported that 10 people were arrested and charged with violations of the state’s sex buying statute (§ 5902(e)) between the time since the state criminal code created separate offenses for x buyers and prostituted persons in 2014 through 2017.

In May, 2021, a man was arrested during an online reverse sting operation in Kingston, PA, and was charged with child trafficking and prostitution offenses. Court papers said the 53 year old man was communicating with an officer posing as a child during the sting operation. The suspect told officers the boy was too young for him but knew that his friend preferred children for sex, and that he had, in the past, sent young guys to the other man. The suspect was apprehended when he arrived to meet with the boy, and charged with unlawful contact with a minor, trafficking of a minor, and promoting prostitution of a minor. Police said the man “recruited, enticed and solicited who he believed to be a 15-year-old boy knowing or recklessly disregarding that the minor would be subjected to sexual servitude.”

Not all sex buyer arrests are the product of reverse stings using fictional decoys, but may result from investigations or enforcement actions that are responding to specific allegations of crimes. In some cases, sex buyers lose their employment, either by termination from their employers or by resigning. For example, in July 2021, the former president of the Pennsylvania Bar Association had been accepted into a diversion program (ARD, or Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition). The program allows first-time offenders to enter into a treatment program as a disposition of his third-degree misdemeanor charge of patronizing prostituted persons. According to the Luzerne County District Attorney’s Office, the sex buyer is required to enroll in the program for a year, during which time he will have to complete 30 hours of community service. The charge can be expunged upon completion of the ARD program. In this case, the man had reported to Luzerne County detectives that he had engaged in commercial sex with a prostituted woman, and the sex buyer accused her of recording their encounter and threatening to release the video unless he paid her. He was investigated when it was confirmed that he had paid for sex.  The man resigned his position as PBA president when he was charged, and was also placed on administrative leave from his position as an assistant solicitor for Luzerne County.