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’t 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.
And now, with eight states handing down felony charges for prostitution—where nonviolent, mostly female prostitution offenders are serving in state prison—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—and treat—people working in prostitution.
The latest example of this shift to view people in prostitution as victims rather than criminals is last week’s passage of a bill removing the felony penalty in Illinois—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.
“There 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,” said Illinois state Sen. Dale Righter, a Republican and former prosecutor, when the bill was being debated. “People who would disagree with that would say, ‘there’s a notion of personal responsibility here. They decided to do it.’ And you know, in the strictest of legal terms, there’s no doubt that that’s 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.”
Texas, not exactly known for its leniency to offenders, also came close to eliminating its felony penalty this year. (A bill made it out of committee but wasn’t voted on, and there is still felony prostitution in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan and Missouri.) ”It’s nuts that we’ve got this many prostitutes in prison, people that we’re not afraid of, but we’re just mad at,” the state’s Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire told the Austin American Statesman last year. “By locking them up, we’re not fixing the problem—we’re 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.”
Prostitution remains the only crime in which more women are arrested than men.
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