Sunday, May 25, 2008
Opinion

In Atlanta, pricey prostitution is OK

Prostitution between adults should be legalized, but if we’re not going to do that, the laws against it should apply to everyone, not just the $30-per-trick streetwalkers.

Chart: Analysis by Stephanie Ramage.
Designed by Jason Mallory/The Sunday Paper
Source: APD

By Stephanie Ramage

First, a little housekeeping. I sometimes receive e-mails from readers regarding the content of The Sunday Paper’s Quick section. I am taking this opportunity to clear up a widespread misconception that I write for that section. I do not, nor have I ever. And that should have been obvious given that it is funny, and I am not. The section is compiled and written by Editor in Chief Kevin Moreau and Editorial Assistant Larissa Greer (with some assistance from our intern staff). Any outraged observations or words of praise should be directed their way.

Nor am I the publisher of SP, as I have been introduced on a number of occasions. Our publisher, Patrick Best, is a tall man with dark hair and some say-so over the paper’s budget. I am a 5-foot-4 blonde whose gender may be in doubt, but whose role certainly isn’t. I am the news editor and a columnist. Sometimes in the news section, writers other than myself cover issues that I have written about, or will write about, in my column.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about prostitution, but I’m writing about it again because the chart we published last week (which we’ve reproduced here) with the cover story, “Schooled,” shows that Atlanta’s prostitution laws are not applied equally to the populace.

Atlanta’s prohibition on prostitution is enforced almost exclusively against poor streetwalkers and their economically disadvantaged johns, while high-dollar hookers are allowed to pursue their trade with impunity without so much as a whisper of enforcement from the Atlanta Police Department.

Atlanta’s “hotel hookers” are not a secret. Some of them ply an illegal trade under the guise of working for perfectly legal escort services. They meet their business clients via the Internet, and carry out their assignations in some of Atlanta’s most posh accommodations, from downtown to Buckhead. Yet you won’t find anyone who looks like they’d fit that bill on the vice arrests page of the APD.
 
Last week, The Sunday Paper published photos of the 14 johns who have been convicted following arrests for “solicitation of prostitution” by the APD since January. Of the 14, not one was white. No fewer than 12 were black, and two were Latino. Should we believe that not one white man has bought a prostitute’s services in Atlanta so far this year?

Similarly, of the 108 prostitutes arrested and convicted, all but 20 were black. What does that have to do with being poor? Whites in the metro area tend to be more affluent than blacks, but you don’t have to look up the numbers on the U.S. Census Bureau’s Web site to figure out that the hookers being cuffed by the APD aren’t recent employees of The Emperor’s Club V.I.P. That, too, is frightfully plain from the photos posted on the police department’s Web site (www.atlantapd.org; click on “news center” and then “vice arrests”).

Many of these women are advanced in years. Some of them look to be in their 60s. Others are obviously so cracked out that I could roll a grocery cart down the street, tell them to hop in and push them over to the city jail, and they would ask me if the petroleum jelly was on aisle four. A few appear to have some other sort of mental disability. Nearly all look destitute. Based on the number of coats and sweaters in the photos, it seems likely that they got in the car with the APD’s fake john just to get out of the weather. Some of them may have even known that the “john” was a cop, but jail is safer and warmer than the street.

(Almost all of the APD’s prostitution arrests involve an undercover vice officer, rather than actual johns. I feel badly for those officers; I would think there is something deeply demeaning about frisking a granny who’s just offered to service you.)

You might counter that you don’t care if the cops pick the hookers up, as long as you don’t have to see them working in your neighborhood. I don’t want to see them in mine either, but as long as hooking is illegal, its zoning can’t be regulated. You might argue that hookers need to get honest jobs, but with an arrest for prostitution popping up on their background checks, that becomes more difficult. Who do you think is going to hire a convicted prostitute? Only the kind of people who can use that information to exploit them.

Prostitution in and of itself is shameful enough, and adding legal baggage to all the other baggage weighing down on these people—male and female prostitutes—makes no sense if we are sincere about wanting them to get better jobs, get off drugs and stop selling themselves. If they have the self-awareness to sit still for a minute and think “I’ve got to get out of this,” a looming court date and a humiliating reminder on their public records will only crush that impulse.

Enforcing prostitution laws as they pertain to adults is a preposterous use of a criminal justice system that is already overburdened with addressing crimes that actually harm people, including children. Prostitution between adults should be legalized, but if we’re not going to do that, the laws against it should apply to everyone, not just the $30-per-trick streetwalkers. Not enforcing the laws against more expensive call girls is, in effect, decriminalizing high-dollar prostitution.

And now Mayor Shirley Franklin’s office is entertaining the idea of pursuing a program that will charge $1,000 tuition to educate johns on the sordid lives led by hookers. Looking at the johns arrested by the APD so far, I’m pretty sure they’re well aware that they’re not hooking up with Ashley Alexandra DuPre for the evening. So instead of the City of Atlanta putting a new program in place that will only net them more street johns, why not start enforcing the laws already on the books against everyone, even those who do their cruising on the Web and their transactions at a hotel that has a concierge?

Otherwise, Atlanta should change its law to reflect the real state of its enforcement. We could become the first city in the nation to legalize prostitution on the basis of its cost by making it illegal for prostitutes to charge less than $300 per hour. That way, the APD could go on arresting broke grannies and dying addicts. SP