Why isn’t prostitution decriminalized or legalised in the USA?

I find it odd given that the porn industry is legal, the free market nature if the USA and would have thought criminalizing allows exploitation and trafficking easier.

18 comments

  1. I believe the intent is “to protect vulnerable populations.” We don’t want children or teens to be groomed for the industry. And we don’t want poor people, or maybe someone who doesn’t speak the language well, coerced into a life of prostitution.

    That being said, I definitely think it should be legalized. I would also assume it would help cut down on trafficking but I don’t know if that’s one of those things that works better in theory than in practice.

  2. There is a very complex answer to this, there are people that have extremely unreasonable justifications for both leaving it illegal and legalizing or decriminalizing it.

    Anyone who gives you a one paragraph explanation about why any option is indisputably correct doesn’t know what they are talking about.

  3. For most of the same reasons other counties haven’t so. Even if we ignore that, ensuring there isn’t exploitation happening after it’s legalized is also a complicated problem. There is no clean slate.

  4. Prostitution is not a federal crime, but a state or local concern. A federal law legalizing or decriminalizing something that is not within the purview of the federal government would be immediately challenged and possibly upheld as unconstitutional. I doubt the Interstate Commerce Clause could be this flexible.

  5. The simple answer is because there is no political will to do so. Politicians want to get reelected, and there isn’t a big pro-sex work sentiment among the electorate that would support such a move. Whether or not it “should,” in the abstract, be legal doesn’t matter, practically speaking.

  6. In the state of Nevada, where prostitution is legal, it’s still illegal within the boundaries of Los Vegas. Because the people *wanted* it to be.

    The US doesn’t have a free market that’s legal. The illegal market is often much more free, but depends on upon the legal restrictions to function. That’s precisely why organized crime was so opposed to the repeal of Prohibition – their profits off of alcoholic beverages were dependent upon their being prohibited by law.

  8. >Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn’t selling fucking legal?

    — George Carlin

    Nobody outside Nevada has figured out how to regulate and tax it in order to justify legality.

  9. “It’s legal to fuck it’s legal to spend money but it’s illegal to spend money fucking.”

    George Carlin

  10. Tradition, Religion, Prejudice, Habit, Law Enforcement lobbying, the influence of organized crime

  12. “The free market nature of the USA” is vastly overblown, certainly as a way of analyzing the country and its phenomena.

    There *are* people in the US who want to legalize sex work, but they are on the left, they think of it as *sex work,* and they want legalization because they think *sex workers* are people, workers, who deserve human and labor rights and protections.

    Basically everyone else is intensely Calvinistically moralistic about being anti-sex work, and “prostitution is illegal” is in “the sky is blue”/”oxygen is necessary”/”Hitler was bad” territory in the American mainstream.

    Oh, and then there’s the clear pattern where the social and political elite of the American right have a pattern of engaging in alleged or convicted sexual abuse (Dennis Hastert, Jim Jordan, Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Matt Gaetz, etc). So… the status quo suits plenty of people in the US just fine.

  13. It’s already mostly decriminalized. The actual worker won’t be a felon in most cases.

    The person on the hook is actually the buyer. You get caught paying, you’re done for.

    The only real argument going on is legalization and that is a much more controversial subject.

  15. That prostitution is illegal is, in my opinion, an excellent example of the complex interplay between law and the dominant culture in a region.

    Bottom line: it’s illegal because a majority of people think it should be illegal–simple as that.

    And all the rest–the justification in terms of human trafficking, the discussions of the “exploitation of women”, the concerns over our children, the ideas about protecting the vulnerable–all of this is just people trying to find justification in the fact that at the bottom of the stack, we think prostitution should be illegal, so it is.

    —-

    There are a lot of places in the law where we’ve made things illegal because, well, we think they should be illegal. Sometimes you see a cultural shift to right what was really an outrageous wrong: the legalization of gay marriage, for example. Sometimes you see a cultural shift that looks uneven and tenuous–such as the legalization of marijuana. And sometimes, somewhere, there’s a “Karen” out there who is concerned that someone may be having fun–and by God she’s going to put a stop to it. Like the outdated laws against “sodomy”, which really was a code word for outlawing homosexuality. (Yes, a lot of folks thinks “sodomy” means “anal sex”–but that’s not exactly true. As used, “sodomy” was defined as “perverted sexual acts”–with perversion being in the eye of the beholder.)

    And sometimes, there are places where we *think* something is illegal, when it really is not, because we think it should be illegal. Like, for example, out at the North Carolina Outer Banks–where State and Federal law permit toplessness, but that doesn’t stop the neighbors from calling the police anyways.

    —-

    This complex interplay of law and culture–especially when you hit the cultural fringes, such as when dealing with pornography, prostitution and the like, are deeply fascinating to me–mostly because it shows how much of all of this is not based on logic or reason. That is, you can’t start with some basic principles and derive “prostitution should be illegal.”

    Instead, law is fundamentally driven by and defined by culture. Some things (like “you shouldn’t rape people”) are pretty universal. Some things (like “you shouldn’t flash your titties on a beach”) are less so. And prostitution falls on the list of fairly universal things most people think should be illegal.

    (As an aside, I think toplessness falls into the category of “things we don’t bother to make illegal because we already think it’s illegal.” With a handful of people hoping the majority don’t catch on.)

  17. It’s been decriminalized in some major cities like New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia by not prosecuting those for simple solicitation charges.

    First steps towards legalization? I guess but I can’t say for sure. Rarely do I hear of call girls getting busted for solicitation.

  18. 1. They are not paying the Porn stars for sex, they are paying to film them. The actors are engaging in consensual sex.
    2. Technically they are also engaging in a form of art, which is protected by the 1st ammendment.
    3. There are hard limits to what American government or the people will tolerate free market economies. Sports, Prostitution and Narcotics are the main exceptions, resulting in one generally heavily self regulated, and the other two outright illegal.

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