USA Prostitution: Organizing the oldest profession
From the New Women's Survival Source Book
In 1973, ex-hooker Margo St. James set the media in an uproar with her announcement of the formation of a street-walkers' organization in San Francisco: COYOTE ("call off your old tired ethics"). St. James's flamboyant style and sizzling humor notwithstanding, the purpose and goals of this organization and its sister organizations in San Diego, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Seattle (ASP), New York (PONY), and Honolulu (DOLPHIN) are deadly serious. They are committed to immediate alleviation of the conditions which are so oppressive to street walkers: providing adequate counsel, arranging for bail when prostitutes are arrested, and helping prostitutes learn how to fill out arrest forms; educating prostitutes to their rights - including their rights to plead not guilty and demand jury trials; developing a bail fund for prostitutes who so plea, and working for their release on their own recognizance (which is standard for all other misdemeanors, and even more serious crimes committed by men - for example wife-battering — but is routinely denied prostitutes); challenging requirements that arrested prostitutes be subject to V.D. "quarantines" in jail before trial; providing emergency housing for women immediately out of jail; providing child care for women while they are in jail; helping develop job opportunities for women who wish to leave the profession.
But Coyote and sisters see as their long range goal the decriminalization of prostitution. No, not legalization, decriminalization. And it looks like these women are on their way to achieving what only a few years ago would have been deemed impossible.
What's wrong with the status quo? Coyote, its sister organizations, and allies have worked up a formidable indictment against the present prostitution laws. If, to begin with, criminalization is meant to deter women from prostitution, the present laws achieve the opposite of what they are meant to accomplish. Criminalization can,for instance, trap women into a career of prostitution because permanent labeling in police criminal records increases the difficulty such women have in finding legitimate jobs. Moreover, arresting prostitutes keeps women in "the life" by tying them to their pimps, who provide bail money and counsel, in addition to giving them the "protection" they need against customer and police brutality. And imprisonment itself is hardly a deterrent. Seventy percent of the women currently serving time for felonies were first arrested for prostitution. Clearly prison teaches women only that more serious crimes may pay better.
Criminalization of prostitution breeds contempt for the law in several ways: Relying on entrapment involves police in illicit behavior which is itself corrupting. Present laws are an important source of police graft. Furthermore, selective enforcement - against streetwalkers and not call girls, and against prostitutes and not their clients - drains respect for the law.
It drains more than respect for the law; it drains taxpayer funds. At a time of massive budget crises, criminalization ties up law enforcement personnel and funds that could better be spent on white collar crime and the increasing incidence of violent crime. The San Francisco Crime Commission reported in 1971 that the city spent more than $ 375,000 in one year to arrest, process, and imprison 2,116 prostitutes. Professor Jennifer Jame's studies in Seattle show that it costs the taxpayer in that city $ 1,560-00 in 1973 to arrest one prostitute for offering and agreeing to an illegal sex act.
All in all, the present laws are unenforceable, counterproductive, not to say unjust and violative of civil rights. Whatever else they do, present laws and enforcement efforts hardly put a dent in prostitution. Nor will they, until the root causes of prostitution - sexism and the powerlessness of women, racism, and poverty - are eliminated.
Agreed, the status quo is rapist. But why decriminalization and not legalization, and what's the difference anyway? The difference is monumental and it is utterly crucial for feminists to be aware of it.
Decriminalization means the repeal of all laws against prostitution. This would end the harassment of prostitutes by law enforcement agencies, and would lessen to a great extent the dependency of prostitutes on pimps. "Legalization", on the other hand, simply means the substitution of another set of laws - laws which would bring prostitution under the control of the most powerful pimp of all - the state.