Getting Screwed (21 page)

For Jillian, that sultry August day in 2004 had begun auspiciously enough. Before she met with two scheduled clients, Jillian and Jack, her lover, security guard, and driver, stopped by a friend's house to shoot up. Jillian, then twenty-three, was a heroin user, “a junkie ho,” as she sardonically described herself in her blog.

That afternoon, Jillian remembers flying down Interstate 91 on the way to her first assignation, Jack at the wheel, both of them high and singing along to oldies on the radio. Her first assignation is with a new client who has seen her ad in the local weekly, the
Valley Advocate
, and wants a half-hour with her. But when Jillian and Jack pull into the parking lot of the River Inn in West Springfield, something doesn't feel right. The two-story motel looks seedy; Jack mentions that he used to bag dope in a room here. Oh, Jillian thinks, that kind of place. She gets out of the car and notices that someone is watching her from the balcony. Alarm bells go off, but she ignores them. It's just her paranoia, she thinks. The caller said he would pay $150 for a half-hour, and she needs the bucks. When she started doing heroin, the other call girls were angry with her. She was giving them a bad name, they said; they wanted her to be this wholesome all-American girl who just happened to have sex for money. They saw her as a smart, articulate activist who could speak for them all. She is all of that, she knows. But right now, she's coming off a heroin high and she needs some quick cold cash.

Inside, she is greeted by a skinny, sloppily dressed black man who starts asking her questions, the kind of what-do-I-get-for-this questions that an undercover cop would ask in an effort to get a hooker to admit she is being paid for sex. But the guy's eyes are red-rimmed, and he seems too jumpy and drug-addled to be a cop. At first, Jillian answers his insistent queries with her usual response: “I can't answer that question for obvious reasons, but I think if you call a service like this you know what it's about. . . .” But he keeps nattering on. “Will I get a blow job, will I?” Jillian doesn't like his tone, so she starts walking toward the door, and the man suddenly changes tactics. “Whoa, whoa, you're getting frustrated.” He hands her $160, which she takes. Mistake number one. “I got to go get you change,” she says and starts walking back to
the car. But then she remembers, we don't keep change in the car, so she goes back into the room. The man asks her again, “Will I get a blow job?” and in exasperation, she growls under her teeth, “Yes, you will get a blow job.”

He asks her to take off her clothes, which she does, slowly, seductively, draping her heart-patterned dress over a chair. Then, he tells her to turn around and show him her ass, and at that moment, two detectives walk in and flash their badges. Stunned, Jillian looks at her Judas client, who simply shrugs, as if to say, “Who me?”

The cops tell her to dress, and as soon as she does, they cuff her and lead her out the door, commenting on the track marks on her arms. Jillian wishes she had thought to slather foundation on her arms, which she usually does before going on a call. And then it dawns on her: her heroin habit has gotten the best of her. If she hadn't been so high and greedy to make more dough, she might have seen and heeded the warning signs. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. She is furious with herself and with the cops, especially the one who has radioed in, “We think she just used.”

The police, she knows, couldn't care less that she first started shooting up two years ago for fun. It was a social activity, and it had nothing to do with being an escort. But then her boyfriend, Peter, broke up with her — for the last time — and her best friends blew town. Jillian felt abandoned, and she started shooting up every day, to forget the pain, forget Peter and her loneliness. Before long she was hooked. And this is where her addiction has landed her, handcuffed and defenseless in a stinking motel room, flanked by smirking cops.

Outside, several other cops have surrounded Jack, who is still sitting in the car, his window down. They put a gun to his head, and he tells them to put it down before they hurt somebody. They bark at him to get out of the car, keep his hands up, he's under arrest. “What for?” he asks. “Oh you know,” one cop replies.

Jillian can't hear the rest because she is shoved into the police cruiser, where her two guards start asking questions. Jillian tells them she won't talk until she sees a lawyer. But as they drive off, she can't resist one little
dig. “Wow,” she says, “it must feel so productive arresting people for nonviolent crimes. Right now, someone could actually be getting hurt.” The cop in the passenger's seat turns around and snaps, “You asked for a lawyer to be present, so just shut up.”

Jillian keeps her mouth closed for the rest of the ride, but having read a shelf-load of books on sex work, she knows she has statistics on her side. And she does, to a large extent. Research shows that U.S. laws criminalizing prostitution are counterproductive and a huge waste of resources. In her study, Julie Pearl found that each of the cities she surveyed in 1985 spent an average of $7.5 million enforcing prostitution laws, more than some of these cities, such as Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, and San Diego, spent on municipally funded health services the same year. Half the city governments studied spent more on prostitution control than on either education or public welfare.
¹³
In 1985 alone, sixteen of America's largest cities spent more than $120 million on prostitution arrests.
¹⁴
That translated into an average of almost $2,000 ($1,989) to bust just one sex worker, Pearl found.
¹⁵

Over the last three decades, from 1980 to 2012 (the most recent numbers available online are for 2012), total prostitution arrests in the United States have fluctuated widely, reaching a high of 111,400 in 1990 and dropping to a low of 55,374 in 1999. In 2000, total arrests shot up again, to 87,620 (largely in response to the federal antitrafficking law passed that year), but by 2012, they were back down again, to 56,575, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. If you multiply 56,575 arrests by $2,000, the total amounts to more than $113 million in taxpayer money spent each year on arresting prostitutes, most of whom are never prosecuted.

Pearl also discovered that law enforcement agencies in America's largest cities spend more time and resources arresting prostitutes than they do pursuing and solving violent crimes. On average, she found, police in these cities made as many arrests for prostitution as they did for all violent offenses combined. In 1986, police in Boston, Cleveland, and Houston arrested twice as many people for prostitution as they did for all
homicides, rapes, robberies, and assaults combined. In Dallas, residents and visitors reported over 15,000 violent crimes in 1985, only 2,665 of which resulted in arrest. The same year, Dallas police made 7,280 prostitution arrests, which cost local taxpayers over $10 million.
¹⁶

Police in these cities spend most of their time indoors trying to entrap sex workers like Jillian and Joi Love. For example, vice officers typically spent thirty to forty minutes in massage parlors before making an arrest, Pearl found. Yet such efforts provide no additional protection for the public.
¹⁷

Indeed, dozens of researchers in recent years have criticized enforcement of prostitution laws on the grounds that it diverts the attention of law enforcement agencies from more serious crimes. Most police officers who arrest streetwalkers are not out there patrolling for other types of crime. As Pearl found in her interviews with law enforcement in the nation's largest cities, undercover vice officers who make most of the prostitution arrests “have neither the time nor responsibility to search for and arrest perpetrators of violent and property crimes.”
¹⁸

And that remains true today. Melvin Scott, the commander of the Narcotics and Special Investigations Division of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., says the members of his vice squad focus on arresting prostitutes and traffickers, not other kinds of criminals.

HIPS
's Cyndee Clay says that arresting sex workers does not help them get out of prostitution or improve the communities in which they stroll. “It's a massive waste of resources,” Clay says. “If we weren't spending this much money on law enforcement, we could spend more resources to help people get to the point where sex work becomes a choice, one of many options, as opposed to an economic necessity.”

Many researchers agree that refocusing law enforcement efforts on violent crime, property theft, and underage prostitution would be a much more effective use of taxpayer dollars. Ronald Weitzer, the George Washington University sociologist and longtime scholar of the sex industry, notes that the United States has been arresting sex workers and clients for decades, yet prostitution continues to flourish. Indeed, it is on
the rise in the United States, as it is globally. In an essay he wrote for the
Annual Review of Sociology
in 2009, Weitzer argues that it is time to recognize that law enforcement is not an effective solution to what is essentially a socioeconomic problem.
¹⁹
As he and others note, criminalization is a failed strategy that clearly harms sex workers and lets violent predators off the hook.

“What we're doing is fueling a law enforcement machine,” Clay agrees. “I would rather use that money stopping violent crime and arresting people who actually hurt others.” Clay says the same holds true for arrests of clients, known in the trade as johns. When police spend a lot of time setting up stings to arrest johns in hotels, brothels, or even on the street, she notes, they are usually “arresting regulars who are not violent and have good jobs.”
HIPS
, she says, compiles a list of clients reported by street workers to be violent, and the organization shares that information with other sex workers. “If sex workers were able to talk to police, we could get violent people off the street,” she says. “That's where our resources should be going, not toward arresting adults involved in consensual sex.”

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?