{"id":39183,"date":"2013-06-05T08:26:49","date_gmt":"2013-06-05T07:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/why-do-we-throw-prostitutes-in-prison\/39183\/"},"modified":"2013-06-05T08:26:49","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T07:26:49","slug":"why-do-we-throw-prostitutes-in-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/why-do-we-throw-prostitutes-in-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do We Throw Prostitutes in Prison?"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 4, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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Sex worker activists (who want the sex trade to be treated like any other work) and prostitution abolitionists (who want to see it disappear entirely) don\u2019t agree on much, but they do on this: Giving people charged with prostitution a felony also gives them a criminal record that makes other work almost impossible to find, thus trapping them into selling sex in perpetuity. <\/p>\n

And now, with eight states handing down felony charges for prostitution \u2013 where nonviolent, mostly female prostitution offenders are serving in state prison \u2014 a battle to lessen criminal penalties has been joined by an unlikely ally. Conservative lawmakers, looking at price tags, are also receptive to changing the way we see \u2014 and treat \u2013 people working in prostitution. <\/p>\n

The latest example of this shift to view people in prostitution as victims rather than criminals is last week\u2019s passage of a bill removing the felony penalty in Illinois \u2013 which has some of the harshest prostitution laws in the country. The legislation sailed through the Illinois Legislature, after a decade of work by End Demand Illinois, a coalition that wants to see prostitution eliminated. The highest penalty for selling sex in the state will now be a Class A misdemeanor. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere are very, very few crimes, in my view, that exist in the criminal code, that you can truly say in this instance, the perpetrator is likely as much a victim as they are a perpetrator,\u201d said Illinois state Sen. Dale Righter, a Republican and former prosecutor, when the bill was being debated. \u201cPeople who would disagree with that would say, \u2018there\u2019s a notion of personal responsibility here. They decided to do it.\u2019 And you know, in the strictest of legal terms, there\u2019s no doubt that that\u2019s true. But the situations that most of these young ladies find themselves in are unlike any situations that I bet any of us have encountered, and I hope none of us ever have to encounter.\u201d <\/p>\n

Texas, not exactly known for its leniency to offenders, also came close to eliminating\u00a0<\/a>its felony penalty this year. (A bill made it out of committee but wasn\u2019t voted on, and there is still felony prostitution in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan and Missouri.)\u00a0\u201dIt\u2019s nuts that we\u2019ve got this many prostitutes in prison, people that we\u2019re not afraid of, but we\u2019re just mad at,\u201d the state\u2019s Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire told<\/a>\u00a0the Austin American Statesman last year. \u201cBy locking them up, we\u2019re not fixing the problem \u2013 we\u2019re just spending a lot of money incarcerating them, warehousing them, when we could be spending a lot less getting them treatment so they can get out and stay out of this business.\u201d <\/p>\n

Prostitution remains the only crime in which more women are arrested than men. (That includes both arrests for selling sex and for purchasing it.) Prostitution arrests happen on the streets \u2013 in sweeps or in response to neighborhood complaints \u2013 in raids on establishments thought to be promoting prostitution, and through sting operations conducted through sites like Backpage. Sex worker advocates have criticized<\/a>\u00a0such \u201cend demand\u201d campaigns for partnering with the criminal justice system, which they argue further marginalizes people in the sex trade, but Lynne Johnson, policy and advocacy director at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, said the alliance had been key to removing the felony penalty. <\/p>\n

\u201cBoth police and prosecutors are on the front lines of watching prostitution, how it works on the street. They see the desperation of the people in prostitution, they came to recognize that the practice of habitual arrest and rearrest was not working, and that folks are in need of specialized services and are in need of more intelligent responses,\u201d Johnson told Salon. <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 4, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Sex worker activists (who want the sex trade to be treated like any other work) and prostitution abolitionists (who want to see it disappear entirely) don\u2019t agree on much, but they do on this: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-39183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}