You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos by Robert Arthur

Author:Robert Arthur [Arthur, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936239467
Publisher: Feral House
Published: 2012-12-14T04:30:00+00:00

E. Monetary Costs: Jail ’Em All. Why Are My Taxes So High?

In addition to the billions spent on abstinence-only education, billions are also spent on criminalizing consensual adult sex. One of the only studies of the cost of prostitution enforcement was done in the mid-1980s.38 It found that in Dallas the average arrest, court, and incarceration costs amounted to roughly $2,900 per prostitution arrest, and that large cities spent an average of over $16 million on prostitution control every year.39 Half of the sixteen cities studied spent more on prostitution control than on either education or public welfare. Although judges are loath to use strapped prison space on prostitutes, police still focus resources on prostitution.

This prioritizing is not without consequences. During Houston’s crusade against prostitution in 1975, eleven percent of the police department’s criminal investigative force handled prostitution cases exclusively. While Houston waged this failed prostitution battle, reported felonies increased and their rate of arrest decreased. In the mid-1980s, Cleveland spent eighteen officer hours on prostitution duty for every violent offense that failed to yield an arrest.

This was at a time when national polls showed (1) ninety-four percent of people who called the police believed they should have responded faster than they did, (2) less than half the population could say prostitutes did more harm than good, and (3) people ranked prostitution’s severity 174th out of 206 offenses. “A store owner knowingly puts ‘large’ eggs into containers marked ‘extra large’” placed 175th.

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