Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [19]
These six pimps ranged in age from their early thirties to their late forties and “were doing pretty well,” Venkatesh says, making roughly $50,000 a year. Some also held legit jobs—car mechanic or store manager—and most owned their homes. None were drug addicts.
One of their most important roles was handling the police. Venkatesh learned that the pimps had a good working relationship with the police, particularly with one officer, named Charles. When he was new on the beat, Charles harassed and arrested the pimps. But this backfired. “When you arrest the pimps, there’ll just be fighting to replace them,” Venkatesh says, “and the violence is worse than the prostitution.”
So instead, Charles extracted some compromises. The pimps agreed to stay away from the park when kids were playing there, and to keep the prostitution hidden. In return, the police would leave the pimps alone—and, importantly, they wouldn’t arrest the prostitutes either. Over the course of Venkatesh’s study, there was only one official arrest of a prostitute in an area controlled by pimps. Of all the advantages a prostitute gained by using a pimp, not getting arrested was one of the biggest.
But you don’t necessarily need a pimp to stay out of jail. The average prostitute in Chicago will turn 450 tricks before she is arrested, and only 1 in 10 arrests leads to a prison sentence.
It’s not that the police don’t know where the prostitutes are. Nor have the police brass or mayor made a conscious decision to let prostitution thrive. Rather, this is a graphic example of what economists call the principal-agent problem. That’s what happens when two parties in a given undertaking seem to have the same incentives but in fact may not.
In this case, you could think of the police chief as the principal. He would like to curtail street prostitution. The cop on the street, meanwhile, is the agent. He may also want to curtail prostitution, at least in theory, but he doesn’t have a very strong incentive to actually make arrests. As some officers see it, the prostitutes offer something far more appealing than just another arrest tally: sex.
This shows up loud and clear in Venkatesh’s study. Of all the tricks turned by the prostitutes he tracked, roughly 3 percent were freebies given to police officers.
The data don’t lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.
It would be hard to overemphasize how undesirable it is to be a street prostitute—the degradation, the risk of disease, the nearly constant threat of violence.
Nowhere were the conditions as bad as in Washington Park, the third neighborhood in Venkatesh’s study, which lies about six miles north of Roseland and West Pullman. It is more economically depressed and less accessible to outsiders, especially whites. The prostitution is centered around four locations: two large apartment buildings, a five-block stretch of busy commercial street, and in the park itself, a 372-acre landmark designed in the 1870s by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. The prostitutes in Washington Park work without pimps, and they earn the lowest wages of any prostitutes in Venkatesh’s study.
This might lead you to think that such women would rather be doing anything else but turning tricks. But one feature of a market economy is that prices tend to find a level whereby even the worst conceivable job is worth doing. As bad off as these women are, they would seem to be worse off without prostitution.
Sound absurd?
The strongest evidence for this argument comes from an unlikely source: the long-loved American tradition known as the family reunion. Every summer around the Fourth of July holiday, Washington Park is thronged with families and other large groups who get together for cookouts and parties. For some of these visitors,