Legalisation of Prostitution

Currently most everywhere in the United States, our legal system penalizes prostitutes and their customers for what they do as consenting adults. Money is still spent on law enforcement efforts to catch prostitutes and their customers. Once caught, justice departments have to process these people through very expensive systems. (Levitan 74-85)

Prostitution is the oldest profession which boasts a never-ending supply of willing buyers and sellers. Prostitution can never be eradicated so it should be legalized and controlled. The legalization of prostitution would produce positive results such as, but not limited to, increased police time and resources, fewer cases of HIV and a safer environment for prostitutes and their children. In addition, legalization would also allow prostitutes to exercise their basic human rights and personal liberties.

What are the end results? Police personnel and courtrooms are overburdened with these cases, having little or no impact on prostitution. The prostitutes and their customers pay their fines and are back to the streets in no time in a revolving door process. Catch and release may work for recreational fishing but it has no deterring affect on prostitution.

Making prostitution legal will allow the act to be managed instead of ignored. Pimps and organized crime figures, who regularly treat their workers on subhuman levels, would no longer control women. In some countries, prostitute rings buy and sell women on the black market, force their women to comply through violence and create unhealthy working conditions. When prostitutes operate independently and in secret, many times they become abused by their own customers. (Albert 15-20)

Legalizing prostitution would prevent underground prostitution that occurs today. When men want to pay for sex, they find prostitutes. These people work in massage parlours, escort services, strip bars and modelling agencies or still work corners as traditional streetwalkers. There are legitimate parlours, dating services, bars and agencies but of the hundreds that exist within newspaper classified advertisements and telephone directories, there are a large number that provide sexual services. A routine search through Google's Internet news engine for 'prostitution' routinely reveals connections between prostitution and these falsetto agencies. (Schmid 35-59)

It is estimated that 100,000 to 3 million teens are nearly invisibly prostituted per year in the United States. If we allow prostitution to remain hidden from view and basically invisible to the law as it is today, we allow a number of teens to be swept up into prostitution every year. When ...