mikeyank
Long time forumite
There is yet another front page "scandel" in the tabloids here in New York involving some hooker ring in Manhattan.
Why in 2012 in the United States of America, is it still a crime for an adult to exchange money with another adult for sexual pleasure? Who is being harmed? It's as dumb as marijuana still being illegal too, but that is a different discussion.
There is a short column by Denis Hamill in today's New York Daily News that makes a lot of sense, to me.
Prostitution should be legal in New York
Let city reap revenues & lose fake outrage
The world’s oldest profession shows no signs of disappearing.
On April 10, 1836, a prostitute named Helen Jewitt was murdered in downtown Manhattan. Police charged a rich john named Richard Robinson, 19, with the homicide.
The murder, arrest and trial were splashed across page one of The New York Herald, edited by James Gordon Bennett, tripling circulation and creating a new popular journalism of sex, money and murder.
Today, 176 years after Jewitt's murder, prostitution stories still sell newspapers and boost TV news ratings.
But maybe the fake outrage created by this latest installment, about the alleged soccer-mom madam, offers the right time for a couple of legislators with a pair of bills to try to legalize or at least regulate prostitution in New York.
But enough with the fake outrage, okay?
Enough with the “Stop-the-presses! I'm shocked — shocked! — that there are hookers in New York!”
Are we kidding, here in the city that never stops sleeping with everybody else? Anyone who's ever opened the back of a local weekly tabloid or logged onto craiglist knows hookers are everywhere.
They've been here since the Dutch settled the town.
But legalizing prostitution will make the whole business safer for johns, hookers and the citizenry. It will eliminate violent, extortionist pimps, create cleaner, safer work environments, impose mandatory condom laws and STD screening of registered prostitutes by the Department of Health.
In Nevada, where prostitution is legal in nine of its 17 counties, there hasn't been a reported case of HIV amongst registered prostitutes since mandatory screening began in 1982.
"If I were able to get 1,000 girls working legally in Las Vegas, where prostitution is illegal, I could deliver the city a half-billion dollars every 18 months," says George Flint, head lobbyist of the Nevada Brothel Owners Association.
He says we could times that by 10 in New York.
Cash-strapped New York could rack up a $5-a-head Sack Tax, fees for brothel licensing and work permits, and income taxes from brothel owners and hookers.
Just as the repeal of Prohibition ridded the liquor industry of organized crime, vile human traffickers and snakeheads selling young women into sexual slavery would soon disappear because there would be no underground demand.
Flint argues that regulating this industry would be much cheaper than arresting, adjudicating and imprisoning hookers, pimps and madams.
C'mon, does anyone actually believe we have a safer republic because Heidi Fleiss or Kristin Davis did jail time?
Why in 2012 in the United States of America, is it still a crime for an adult to exchange money with another adult for sexual pleasure? Who is being harmed? It's as dumb as marijuana still being illegal too, but that is a different discussion.
There is a short column by Denis Hamill in today's New York Daily News that makes a lot of sense, to me.
Prostitution should be legal in New York
Let city reap revenues & lose fake outrage
The world’s oldest profession shows no signs of disappearing.
On April 10, 1836, a prostitute named Helen Jewitt was murdered in downtown Manhattan. Police charged a rich john named Richard Robinson, 19, with the homicide.
The murder, arrest and trial were splashed across page one of The New York Herald, edited by James Gordon Bennett, tripling circulation and creating a new popular journalism of sex, money and murder.
Today, 176 years after Jewitt's murder, prostitution stories still sell newspapers and boost TV news ratings.
But maybe the fake outrage created by this latest installment, about the alleged soccer-mom madam, offers the right time for a couple of legislators with a pair of bills to try to legalize or at least regulate prostitution in New York.
But enough with the fake outrage, okay?
Enough with the “Stop-the-presses! I'm shocked — shocked! — that there are hookers in New York!”
Are we kidding, here in the city that never stops sleeping with everybody else? Anyone who's ever opened the back of a local weekly tabloid or logged onto craiglist knows hookers are everywhere.
They've been here since the Dutch settled the town.
But legalizing prostitution will make the whole business safer for johns, hookers and the citizenry. It will eliminate violent, extortionist pimps, create cleaner, safer work environments, impose mandatory condom laws and STD screening of registered prostitutes by the Department of Health.
In Nevada, where prostitution is legal in nine of its 17 counties, there hasn't been a reported case of HIV amongst registered prostitutes since mandatory screening began in 1982.
"If I were able to get 1,000 girls working legally in Las Vegas, where prostitution is illegal, I could deliver the city a half-billion dollars every 18 months," says George Flint, head lobbyist of the Nevada Brothel Owners Association.
He says we could times that by 10 in New York.
Cash-strapped New York could rack up a $5-a-head Sack Tax, fees for brothel licensing and work permits, and income taxes from brothel owners and hookers.
Just as the repeal of Prohibition ridded the liquor industry of organized crime, vile human traffickers and snakeheads selling young women into sexual slavery would soon disappear because there would be no underground demand.
Flint argues that regulating this industry would be much cheaper than arresting, adjudicating and imprisoning hookers, pimps and madams.
C'mon, does anyone actually believe we have a safer republic because Heidi Fleiss or Kristin Davis did jail time?
