Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  Despite dismal conviction rates (for both sex workers and clients), police acknowledge that laws against prostitution have a direct payoff for them — in public relations and increased funding from federal antitrafficking task forces. They can use prostitute arrests, which are relatively safe and easy to make, to bolster crime statistics and improve their image as effective crime fighters. Yet such statistics engender a false sense of security among the public. Consider New York State’s breakdown of reported complaints and arrests in 2011: while almost 90 percent of reported prostitution cases were closed by arrest, only 58 percent of complaints about violent crimes yielded an arrest that year, according to records obtained from New York State’s Division of Criminal Justice Services and the 2011 New York State Statistical Yearbook online.20

  Some police openly acknowledge that they prefer arresting prostitutes to pursuing more dangerous criminals. As one Las Vegas metropolitan police lieutenant told a reporter, “You get up in a penthouse at Caesar’s Palace with six naked women frolicking in the room and then say, ‘Hey, baby, you’re busted!’ That’s fun.”21

  Such busts are a huge waste of resources that do little to deter prostitution. Moreover, arresting sex workers (most of whom are streetwalkers) further marginalizes vulnerable women, making it more difficult for them to obtain housing and other kinds of employment. Once they’ve been arrested for prostitution, women have tremendous difficulty getting a job outside the sex industry. They also face discrimination in housing and child custody cases, according to advocates who work with the homeless. And such marginalization occurs even when there are no convictions. In most states, all it takes is an arrest to launch this vicious cycle. When someone is arrested for prostitution, that arrest goes into the state’s bureau of criminal identification and becomes part of the public record that is available to employers and housing managers who routinely do background checks, according to an analyst for the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and a New York defense attorney.

  A few years after her arrest, Jillian obtained a copy of her Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) and discovered, to her chagrin, that her 2004 arrest for prostitution was included in that publicly available record, even though she was never convicted. “That goes against the whole innocence until proven guilty thing, don’t you think?” Jillian says.

  In her 2002 book, Prostitution Policy, Lenore Kuo, a professor of women’s studies and philosophy and chair of the Women’s Studies Program at California State University, Fresno, argued that once women are arrested for prostitution, they often cannot obtain regular employment or housing because of the criminal record checks many employers and low-income housing managers do. She concluded, “Arresting prostitutes often serves only to heighten their isolation and estrangement, not only from friends, family and the community but also from the very . . . services they may need in order to access alternative means of income.”22

  The repercussions of criminalization don’t end there. “Not only does the arrest of prostitutes permanently and officially stigmatize [women], it also often results in the loss of child custody, deportation, housing and other forms of discrimination,” Kuo notes.23

  The specter of discrimination is the last thing on Jillian’s mind as she sits in the back of the police car, her wrists chafing under the cuffs. She is much more worried about the possibility of going through withdrawal alone, in a filthy jail cell. The year before, Jillian had read about a young woman who had died of heatstroke and withdrawal complications after being locked up for hours in a Framingham, Massachusetts, jail cell. Could something like that happen to her, too?

  At the precinct, the police rifle through Jillian’s purse, looking for drug paraphernalia and drugs. They come up empty-handed. Even so, they give her the dirty junkie routine. “If I catch anything from you . . .” one cop says. Jillian tries to keep her cool and heckle them as much as possible. Every officer she sees gets the how-productive-to-arrest-people-for-nonviolent crimes line. The captain loses his temper. “This isn’t Northampton, sweetheart, so save it for the judge and spare us your beliefs.”

  Jillian is thrown into an empty cell, and a wave of nauseating powerlessness washes over her. She sees the words “I want to go home” carved high up on the plaster wall of her cell and wants to cry. The trick, she remembers reading somewhere, is to keep your mind occupied, so you don’t have to think about what might happen to you, all alone in this godforsaken place. She racks her brain to come up with a good protest song. The only one she can think of is “We shall overcome.” She starts singing it at the top of her lungs and learns later that Jack heard her all the way down in the men’s cells. Finally, a policewoman comes in and tells her she’ll be there all night if she doesn’t shut up.

  A little later, she is joined by another hooker, whom she recognizes as Constance, of Constance and Anastasia in the Valley Advocate ads. Constance tells Jillian that she didn’t agree to anything, didn’t take the money or remove her clothes; they have nothing to make the arrest stick. Even so, since she is from Connecticut and crossed state lines, her bail may be set too high for her to get out before court in the morning. So she asks Jillian to please call her boyfriend if she makes bail. “Of course,” Jillian says, and the two women bond over war stories about their work.

  Finally, the same policewoman returns to take Jillian to the booking area, where she has the opportunity to make the one phone call that could spring her — until her court hearing in the morning. She desperately tries to remember what numbers she’d memorized for just this situation (the police confiscated her cell phone during the arrest). She knows she can’t call her parents; her father would probably get on the phone and start yelling that this is where she belongs, in jail, until she cleans up her act. And her mother wouldn’t know what to do. Jillian stays in regular contact with her mother, an Orthodox Jew who constantly prays for her, but doesn’t speak very often to her father. He disapproves of her occupation and wants nothing to do with her.

  She calls one friend’s number, but there is no answer; the same thing happens when she calls two other names high on her memorized list. It is 2:00 in the morning after all. On the next try, she gets through to a friend of Jack’s, a drug dealer, and he says he can get the bail money but doesn’t have a car. The bail bondsman, whose time is just about up, agrees to make one final phone call for Jillian, and she gives him the number for another hooker by the name of Ruth, who is at the very bottom of her list. Hallelujah, Ruth answers the phone. Yes, she says, she has a car and she will pick up Jack’s friend and bring him and the money to Springfield. They arrive just in time, with enough loot to spring her and Jack. Jillian feels so grateful and humbled. As she walks out of prison, a free woman, she muses out loud, “Who among all your friends can you count on when you need bail? A drug dealer and a ho.”

  In addition to taking Jillian’s cell phone, the police have confiscated all the money she and Jack had on them. So Jillian asks Ruth to drive her to one last assignation, which she got off her voicemail from the day before. The customer is more than happy to party with her, but the money Jillian collects from him doesn’t last long. “We spent the money so we could be high just in time for court, because that’s the kind of shallowly rebellious prick I am,” Jillian writes in her blog a month later. “I just want everyone to understand that this [arrest] is no deterrent, only inspiration for greater heights of criminal activity.”

  The Rhode Island Story

  The morning after Jillian is sprung from jail by “a drug dealer and a ho,” her case is continued without a finding. Jillian is hopeful that the prostitution charges will eventually be dismissed, since it’s her first offense. But then her father writes a letter to the Hampden County District Attorney’s Office, telling prosecutors that his daughter is hooked on heroin and pleading with them to mandate that she receive treatment in exchange for a lighter sentence. Jillian is furious at him, but the die is cast. In February 2005, she pleads guilty to a prostitution misdemeanor and agrees
to enter a methadone maintenance program in exchange for the promise of getting the prostitution charge cleared from her record. That evening, Jillian, with characteristic sass, updates friends on her online journal: “If only my estranged father hadn’t fucked me in court by sending a hysterical please-incarcerate-and-forcibly-rehabilitate-my-crazy-junkie-daughter letter to the DA, drugs wouldn’t even have been an issue in this case, but oh well. Anyway, it gives me a few months of freedom to, er, Get it Out of My System, and eventually clean my record. Darlene reminded me that as soon as I get on the program I’ll be earning shitloads of cash once again, which I can spend spoiling my friends, being a self-righteous philanthropist, creating even more self-righteous communes, and saving up for my next habit.”

  In the end, Jillian does no prison time and completes her year of probation without further incident. But she has become hooked on methadone, which she considers “100 times more addictive than heroin.” In an interview a few years later, she says she is still trying to wean herself off methadone but finding it incredibly difficult. In the meantime, the authorities have a “sword of Damocles” over her head. “If I don’t follow every bureaucratic rule in the program, they cut off my supply and I’m in horrible torture for months,” she says. “Forced treatment is nothing better than mind control.”

  Julie Moya has her own sword of Damocles to deal with upon her release from prison in 2007. She is still on probation and completely broke. “I didn’t know how I was going to face the world again,” she recalls. “I had an arrest record and no high school education. What could I possibly do?”

  In prison, at least, there had been some structure to her days. After a few months in Bedford Hills, a maximum-security prison for women in Westchester County, Julie was transferred to Beacon, a minimum-security facility in upstate New York, which was essentially a working cattle farm. The farmer in charge saw that Julie had a way with animals, so he put her in charge of the cow pod. “I made friends with everyone there,” she says. “I was working with the calves. They would send the baby calves in with their umbilical cords hanging off, and I would take care of them until they were six months old. I took care of one little blind calf for a long time.”

  At Beacon, Moya worked from 8:00 in the morning until 8:00 in the evening and was exhausted by the end of the day. Even so, she loved it. “The work farm was like being in paradise,” she says. “You could see the rivers and beautiful mountains in the distance.”

  Her release from prison was a rude awakening. She felt angry and adrift in a city in which she had once felt embraced. It took her a long time to regain her footing. Several co-workers whom she had bailed out when they were all arrested in 2005 repaid their loans. Other friends came around and told her that she had to open up her place again. “They missed the place,” she says and then laughs. “Half of the guys at NBC had our website on their computers. It really was the best little whorehouse in New York.”

  But deep inside, Julie was hurt and angry — at the lies that law enforcement had spread about her and the people who had turned on her to save their own skins. She decided to write a blog about her experiences — to get the truth out there, she says — and also to make the case for legalizing prostitution in the United States. “I used to not want legalization; I thought it would lower prices and allow the government to get their hands on it,” she says over lunch one day at an Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan. “But now I do. I think it would make things safer for the girls and clients too.”

  Many sex workers are afraid their families will find out what they do, she says. If sex work were legal in the United States, they wouldn’t fear being arrested and having their families find out and ostracize them. Julie envisions a system in which brothels would be licensed and sex workers would receive certificates or cards and would be tested regularly for sexually transmitted diseases. If prostitution were legal, she says, sex workers would also be eligible for social security and health benefits, which they currently don’t have access to. “Women should have control over their own bodies,” she says. “They can get an abortion, but they can’t have a transaction involving sex. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Legalizing or decriminalizing adult consensual sex work, Julie says, would also make it easier to crack down on traffickers and places that are run by criminals, because sex workers would be more likely to come forward and report abuse to the police. “Robbers and extortionists know we are easy targets because we won’t go and report them.” Julie’s own employees have been robbed a few times, usually late at night, when they were carrying cash from the day’s transactions. One time, her son was robbed of $4,000 in the lobby of their brothel by two men pretending to be clients. Julie did report that crime to the police (and she wasn’t arrested), but the money was never recovered. “I think it was an inside job, and all we could do was fire the security person who I think was in on it,” she says.

  Julie hopes that legalization might also help lift the long-standing stigma around being a sex worker and allow sex workers to pay taxes and receive benefits as other workers do. When she was released from prison, Julie herself was eager to erase the stigma and shame she had felt operating in the shadows of the law. She decided to become a chauffeur — she has always felt comfortable driving a big car around New York — so she went back to court to get permission for a driving permit. But the judge refused her request. A few months later, out of options and desperate for money, she reopened Julie’s of New York under a new name. By 2009, she and her son Jerry were running two busy brothels in midtown Manhattan, and Julie was once again able to start saving toward retirement.

  The same month that Julie Moya went back to working as a madam, Joi Love, the single mother who worked in Nevada’s brothels in the 1990s, decided to move to the one other state in the nation that permitted indoor prostitution: Rhode Island. After Joi’s two months at Chicken Ranch in 1996, she had returned to Virginia, kicked out her cheating husband, and enlisted in the Army, where she started as a pay clerk and worked her way up to financial services. Along the way, she earned associate degrees in information technology and business management. In 1999, Joi got a job with the Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Information Technology as a contracts manager and was soon promoted to a contracts administrator for the state. By then, she was the mother of three daughters and a respectable member of the Petersburg, Virginia, community. She worked on the gubernatorial campaign of Mark Warner and attended his inaugural festivities in 2002, and in 2003, she was appointed to the Petersburg Commission on Community Relations Affairs.

  In 2004, Joi took a better-paying job as a purchasing manager and budget analyst with Virginia State University. She received an excellent performance review after her first three months at the university. “Mrs. [Joi’s real last name] is meticulous with details, energetic and drives toward excellence,” the reviewer writes in the August 9, 2004, report (a copy of which Joi gave me, along with other pertinent documentation about her life.) “She formulated and loaded the budget for FY05 in her first week on campus and has excellent organizational skills. She is a solid performer with great potential.”

  A few weeks later, Joi was hired by the Georgia Institute of Technology for a better-paying position in its accounts payable department. Money was tight, and Joi needed to pay the mounting medical bills for her youngest daughter, who had been hospitalized with a severe skin condition. Joi’s mother, who was still living with her, agreed to watch her daughters so that Joi could commute between Virginia and Georgia.

  By the beginning of 2006, however, Joi was fed up with the straight life, tired of bosses who wouldn’t allow much flexibility in her schedule. “I took a few sick days, and when I got back to work on Monday, my boss yelled at me for taking off,” she recalls. “I felt disrespected and used. It just wasn’t worth it.”

  So at the end of January, she quit and began dancing at a strip club in Atlanta. She was thirty-three years old and looked much younger. In May, she and her boyfriend (
whom she’d met at the strip joint) moved to Miami, where Joi danced in several clubs and did sex work on the side. But after she was arrested, first on Miami Beach for prostitution and then during a trip to Las Vegas (charges were dropped in both cases because the police had no proof that she was soliciting), Joi decided it was time to move to a state where prostitution was legal, indoors at least.

  The story of how Rhode Island became the only state other than Nevada where some forms of prostitution were not illegal, and retained that status for almost thirty years, is a fascinating tale, with a cameo appearance by none other than Margo St. James, the founder of the modern sex workers movement. In the mid-1970s, St. James was traveling around the country trying to convince Americans to get the government out of their bedrooms. During a stop in Rhode Island, she met the owner of a downtown Providence strip club who persuaded her to help him challenge the constitutionality of Rhode Island’s prostitution law. In 1976, St. James and COYOTE filed a federal lawsuit, arguing that the Rhode Island statute, which made prostitution a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, was so broad that it could prohibit sex between unmarried adults. The lawsuit also alleged discrimination in how the law was applied, citing data that showed the Providence police were arresting female sex workers much more often than their male customers. As in many other states, the criminal justice system in Rhode Island worked like a giant revolving door. Police would round up sex workers, mostly female streetwalkers, only to see them pay bail and hit the streets again.1

  At a town meeting in 1979, a state district court judge told some Providence residents who were upset about streetwalking in their neighborhood that the way to get prostitutes off the streets was to change the law to make prostitution a misdemeanor and thus speed up their prosecution in the courts. So in 1980, the conservative speaker of the House sponsored a bill that made prostitution a misdemeanor rather than a felony. But in rewriting the law, the drafters somehow deleted a section that addressed committing the act of prostitution, according to the Providence Journal-Bulletin.2 The omission was not caught, and the General Assembly unanimously approved the bill, rendering Margo St. James’s lawsuit moot.