Maine decriminalizes prostitution--new law goes after buyers of sex not purveyors

 Maine Governor Janet Mills signed a bill into law  that partially decriminalizes prostitution in the state, reported Jurist.

Legislative Document (LD) 1435, called An Act to Reduce Commercial Sexual Exploitation, amends existing law to remove all references to prostitution. Instead, the new law criminalizes commercial sexual exploitation, which is a Class E crime carrying a maximum penalty of $1,000 and/or 180 days in jail. The new law goes on to define commercial sexual exploitation as “providing, agreeing to provide or offering to provide a pecuniary (monetary) benefit to another person to engage in a sexual act or sexual contact.” This language limits the criminalization to those who are buying the services—not those selling.

Further criminalized in the new law is commercial sexual exploitation of a minor and a person with a mental disability, which classifies these as Class C crimes carrying penalties of a fine of $5,000 and/or five years in prison.

The new law also mandates the Department of Public Safety consult with anti-trafficking and domestic violence organizations to develop an anti-sex-trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation protocol by March 1, 2024.

In 2021, Mills vetoed a similar bill that aimed to address Maine’s human trafficking problem over fears that the earlier version of the bill (LD 1592) would decriminalize prostitution wholly and “encourage the exploitation of young people.”

Currently, Nevada is the only state that allows limited legal prostitution in the US.

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Sex work may soon be legal in the state of New York

 In New York, selling or buying sex is illegal. That might change in the near future, reports Law360.com.

Two separate bills making their way through the state Legislature — the Stop the Violence in the Sex Trades Act and the Sex Trade Survivors Justice and Equality Act — aim to decriminalize sex work, although with significant differences.

The first bill seeks to fully decriminalize sex work for workers themselves as well as their clients and managers, while the second would only decriminalize it for sex workers. At the root of the difference between the two approaches is a philosophical tug of war: Is sex work a business like any other, or a trade that objectifies and victimizes people and needs to be stopped?

With the exception of Nevada, where prostitution is legal in most counties, sex work is illegal across the United States, so New York lawmakers are looking at countries abroad for insights.

The Stop the Violence in the Sex Trades Act, introduced by state Sen. Julia Salazar, D-Brooklyn, in 2019 and resurfaced this year as S. 3075, borrows the full decriminalization approach adopted by New Zealand in 2003 and by the Australian state of New South Wales in 1979.

The bill would decriminalize consensual sex between adults in exchange for a fee, which is currently a class B misdemeanor. It would also decriminalize use of buildings for sex work, and has a provision to expunge criminal records for prostitution-related offenses that create barriers to employment, housing and access to higher education.

"[What] we're advocating is decriminalization of two parties that agree to exchange sex, for money or for whatever they are exchanging it," Cecilia Gentili, a transgender rights activist and former sex worker who advocates for the bill, told Law360. "It's very personal for me, because I am a sex worker, and I am also a person who experienced trafficking in my life."

Gentili helped found Decrim NY, a coalition of current and former sex workers, public defenders and advocates that has led a campaign for the bill, which has six co-sponsors in the Senate. A companion bill, A. 849, was introduced by Assembly Member Richard N. Gottfried, D-Manhattan, and currently has 17 co-sponsors.

Advocates of the bill seek to treat sex work as any other profession.

"Sex work is a service," Gentili said. "Sometimes it's not even about the sex. Sometimes it's like supporting a person, you know, supporting somebody in other ways and listening to people."

The rival bill, introduced by Sen. Liz Krueger, D-Manhattan, as S. 6040 in March, has a different end game: to help sex workers exit the industry by providing them with social services, housing and other types of support. The bill would make selling sex legal but still prosecute patrons and pimps. It would also continue to forbid sex workers living in the same dwelling. 

This approach, commonly referred to as the Nordic model, was first adopted by Sweden in 1999 and has since been embraced by other European countries such as Norway, Iceland, France, Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Dawn Gresham, a policy adviser to Krueger, said that most sex workers are coerced into the trade, mainly by economic circumstances. The bill would help them escape it, she said.

"People in the sex trade are victims themselves," Gresham told Law360. "Survivors report this as being raped on a daily basis. There is sexual violence they have to contend with."

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Not prosecuting drug possession and prostitution is no threat to public safety

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University measured Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s policy to quit prosecuting drug possession and prostitution, finding no increase in citizen complaints or greater threat to public safety, reported the Baltimore Sun.

The researchers issued their results Tuesday after a 14-month study of the policy. Soon after the coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020, Mosby announced she would cease prosecuting people for possessing drugs, prostitution, and other nonviolent offenses. She also dismissed pending cases of drug possession and prostitution.

Hopkins researchers found she dropped charges against 741 people. Six of those people were rearrested for violent crimes such as robbery and assault, the researchers wrote. That’s less than 1%.

“This suggests that the vast majority of direct beneficiaries of the policy change did not go on to commit crimes threatening public safety,” wrote the four researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Mosby has defended her policy by arguing the prosecution of low-level, nonviolent crimes such as drug possession, open containers and prostitution has disproportionately and harmfully affected minority neighborhoods in Baltimore. The researchers cite statistics that 70% of Maryland’s prison population was Black in 2018 — double the national average. Mosby’s argued tough enforcement can end without an uptick in crime.

“This report demonstrates what we have set out to do as an office — reimagine the criminal justice system, by promoting healthy communities and no longer criminalizing behavioral health issues that do not pose a public safety threat,” Mosby said in a statement.

In March 2020, she announced her policy as a way to reduce the number of people behind bars in Maryland, where they’re at risk of contracting the coronavirus. One year later, she announced the COVID-19 policies would be permanent.

Her policy falls in line with other progressive strategies she brought to Baltimore. In 2019, Mosby announced she would cease prosecuting people for possessing marijuana.

“The data proves that we must continue to move past the era of tough-on-crime prosecution and zero tolerance policing and no longer just default to the status quo of criminalizing mostly people of color for addiction,” she said. “I appreciate the hard work and detailed analysis by the Johns

In the Hopkins study, researchers estimate her policy averted about 440 arrests for drug and paraphernalia possession. Almost 80% of those arrests would have fallen on Baltimore’s Black population, the researchers estimated.

They also counted nearly 4,000 drug-related 911 calls a month before the policy. Afterward, the number of drug-related 911 calls fell to about 2,500, a 37% decrease. And they counted 167 calls a month to 911 about prostitution before the policy. That figure has declined by about five calls a month.

Still, researchers wrote 911 calls may have declined because citizens knew those crimes wouldn’t be prosecuted rather than a reduction in community concern.

“We found these results very encouraging on the whole because we know that putting people into the criminal legal system is harmful to their mental and physical health, and it seems that Baltimore has been able to reduce that problem without incurring a significant cost in terms of public safety,” said Hopkins scientist Saba Rouhani, the study’s lead author.

The researchers conducted the study at the request of Mosby’s office. They noted further study is required to know whether people who use drugs and perform sex work are getting help when they are no longer being criminalized.

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New York moves closer to decriminalizing sex workers

 Last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill that repeals a decades-old statute that advocates say disproportionately targeted trans people who are simply walking or standing on the street. The legislation also automatically seals any previous arrest records under the statute, reported The Appeal. 

“It’s a beginning of a new era,” said TS Candii, executive director of Black Trans Nation and a Black trans woman who has likened the statute—often called the “walking while trans” ban—to stop and frisk, the NYPD tactic of randomly stopping pedestrians to look for guns that disproportionately targeted Black and Latinx people. 

The repeal of the 1976 law, which was ostensibly meant to target those “loitering for the purpose of engaging in a prostitution offense,” comes at a time when similar laws are being rolled back across the country. The Seattle City Council unanimously repealed a similar “prostitution loitering” law in June, and California lawmakers are considering pushing for a similar repeal this year. Activists have also started organizing against similar statutes in Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans.

Next, advocates in New York plan to move forward on efforts to make it the first state to decriminalize sex work. (A bill introduced in 2019 never advanced.) They’ll also advocate for a bill that would vacate sex trafficking-related convictions from people’s records, and push to defund the NYPD’s vice unit. And they’ll have to compete with a bill in the state legislature that decriminalizes sex work while still cracking down on sex workers’ clients, a model that advocates argue won’t protect them.

“We know we’re going to win because we have a majority” of the public’s support, Candii said. A 2019 national poll of registered voters shows a majority of voters support decriminalizing sex work.

The “walking while trans” statute repeal and sex work decriminalization legislation both stem from a growing movement for sex workers’ rights across the U.S. The same year the decriminalization bill was introduced in New York, another was introduced in Washington, D.C. In the recent election, a number of Democratic presidential candidates embraced the idea of decriminalizing sex work.

Although the “walking while trans” statute was intended to target sex workers, its vagueness allowed police to harass trans people of color, advocates say. A 2016 civil rights class-action lawsuit brought by the Legal Aid Society alleged that 85 percent of people arrested under the statute were Black or Latinx, and that women had been arrested for “wearing a ‘short dress,’ ‘a skirt and high heels,’ ‘tight black pants,’ or ‘a black dress.’” 

Those arrests and charges can make it more difficult to get government benefits or even employment, Candii said. “It leaves them more vulnerable.”

A surge of protests in New York after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, including a 15,000-person rally for Black trans lives last summer, helped bolster the movement to repeal the law. But reform has been a long time coming, the result of years of organizing and activism by Candii and others. 

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