Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [270]
The Oldest Profession
Some criminal laws, of course, target women—especially laws against prostitution and disorderly houses. Men, to be sure, can also be arrested for prostitution, and, under many laws, for buying what prostitutes sell. But nobody enforces the laws against male customers; it is overwhelmingly women who pay the price. In a few states, this bias was quite overt and official. Under an Indiana statute, for example, dating back to the time of the First World War, it was a crime for a “female” to offer her body for sale; the law said nothing about male prostitutes, and certainly nothing about customers.24ec Once in a while, a city tried to crack down on “johns.” In New York City in 1921, in a test case, police officers arrested a man found in “certain premises,” lying “in bed between two girls who were entirely nude.” The defendant “was in his union suit” (there was disagreement “as to whether such union suit consisted of B.V.D.’s or underwear of another make”). This hapless soul was dragged into court; but the judge dismissed the case. In the judge’s opinion, the male customer, who “had come for a good time,” violated no known law of the state of New York. A few magistrates actually convicted male customers, but so few that the police were discouraged from making such arrests for fear of civil suits for false arrest, in case the defendant is discharged.”25
Generally speaking, when men were arrested along with women, they escaped free, or, at worst, with a small fine and a healthy dose of embarrassment. In Philadelphia, during one “illustrative” instance in 1920, a “colored vice squad officer” watched a black streetwalker pick up a middle-aged white man (he turned out to be a shipyard worker with a wife and three children). The officer followed the couple, who entered a house; he waited outside for fifteen minutes (giving the couple enough time to get through the preliminaries), then burst in and arrested the two of them as they lay in bed. The woman had no record, but the judge sentenced her to six months in the house of correction. The shipyard worker paid ten dollars and court costs, and went sheepishly home.26
The destruction of the red-light districts, in the teens, closed down houses and drove many women into the streets. This crusade (see chapter 15) replaced madams with (often brutal) male pimps, and in many cities simply made the women’s lives more degraded and more dangerous. 27 In New York, a special Women’s Court was set up in 1918 to deal with “women sex delinquents.” This court commonly processed large numbers of prostitutes after “jump-raids.” The vice police followed the usual technique: after a pickup, they shadowed the couple to the scene of the crime, waited ten or fifteen minutes (“sufficient time,” as one account rather delicately put it, “for incriminating evidence to be obtained”), and then made the raid. Most women defendants were, of course, convicted; first offenders often got probation, but repeaters (and there were many of these) were sent either to “reformative institutions” or to the Workhouse.28 Of course, the people who worked in and around this court thought of themselves as humanitarians: they were helping to save society from disease and depravity while giving fallen women a second chance. In retrospect, however, it is clear where the burdens fell: on the poorest and most unfortunate of the women who sold their bodies on the street.
In 1922, Betty Carey, a San Francisco prostitute, was sentenced to the California Industrial Farm for Women. A California law, passed in 1919, allowed women found guilty of “prostitution ... or of vagrancy because of being a common prostitute” to be sent to the farm (whose purpose, according to the law, was to provide “custody, care, protection, industrial and other training and reformatory help for delinquent women”).29 Ms. Carey did not want that sort of “help,” and she protested on a number