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[Pnx]

What Glyph said... It's honestly not as well regulated as it could be. If they were stricter about enforcing the licensing laws a lot of trouble could be avoided.

It's also worth noting that Amsterdam is one of, if not the biggest hotspot in the world for sex tourism. This means that prostitution there is a lot more lucrative and in demand than it typically would be in many other places.

EDIT:

Boea, are you a Jeopardy contestant or something?

Consider it salt, just consider the question.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And yes~

Did someone ask a question that I didn't notice?

[scriver]

The only reasonable thing is neither to legalize prostitution or to criminalize it. It's to do what Sweden did; Decriminalize selling sex, illegalise buying it. It's the only way to get at the core of the issue, and it doesn't cause more hindrance or threat towards the people who need help from the law than they're already under.

[kaijyuu]

I'm fine with prostitution, provided lots of steps are taken to avoid spreading STDs, along with making sure the... service providers are safe.

I haven't really thought about it before, but my current thoughts are along the lines of licencing both buyers AND sellers, requiring regular checkups for STDs to keep one's privilege to do either.

Regardless, I don't find anything inherently wrong with the practice, except it being incredibly risky.

[Sheb]

(Actually, I was trying to be the Devil's advocate here)

Well, I didn't know enforcement was so lax in the Netherlands. In a case like Amsterdam, outlawing prostitution should lower overall demand, reducing the total amount of abused women (It's hard to imagine it staying the world sex capital with illegal prostitution). Legal prostitution seems to be one of these things that sound nice in theory, but keep getting nasty when you try to implement it.

My favorite way would be to punish the clients and pimps, and offer health service to the prostitutes. Try to diminish the trade as much as possible why keeping it as safe as possible. Seems like this general approach works for a lot of things, like "hard" drugs, were more and more countries offer needles and "shooting facilities" while still going after the drug traffickers.

[Reelya]

Even in well-regulated place like Holland, it's estimated 50% of sex workers are forced into prostitution. The whole trade brings a lot of unpleasantness that apparently can't be regulated away, so it might be better to outlaw it.

Yeah, lets make 100% of the prostitutes illegals, that's going to help :/ (it'll be one more hold the pimp has over his whores, that they'll go to jail too)

There's not a lick of evidence that outlawing it reduces prostitution. It's the same as the drugs laws: It only exacerbates the problems by forcing those women to never approach social services at all out of fear of arrest. This thing with New York basically forcing prostitutes not to use condoms is such a "win" scenario, especially with a country that also outlaws efforts to provide clean needles for drug addicts ( big cross over with the prostitutes i bet). I read once that 60% of needle users in NYC had HepC as compared to 5% of needle users in Australia, due to our efforts to ensure clean needles were available.

Hello AIDS and Hep-C epidemics. (this is already happening amongst US drug/sex subcultures due to the "zero tolerance" approach). The condom thing is going to accelerate the trend.

[SalmonGod]

Homeless man ticketed for scavenging for food in a trash can in Houston, where it is also illegal to offer food to the homeless (without multiple permits, training, schedules, and permissions).

[lorb]

In Vienna you have a system where prostitution is kind-of allowed: You may do it but not commercially, where commercially means someone else than the one doing the service gets any money for it. If it's the same person it is seen as a private transaction. Besides that there are bi-weekly tests for STDs which are not compulsory but if a sex-worker does not go to them they do not get a stamp in their "Deckel" and only a few people want to have sex with someone who can't show you their up-to-date "Deckel". It is actually working quiet good if you only look at prostitution. Associated crimes like human-trafficking obviously still exist but people actually do get arrested and prosecuted for it. Also for procuration which is illegal, which I think helps a lot in reducing the associated crimes.

[Descan]

Procuration... like, pimping? "Taking care" of prostitutes?

Or like, it's illegal to be the John?

[lorb]

The former. My dictionary gives it to me as the translation of the legal term for pimping. See: Wikipedia on Procuring

[Truean]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/12/judge-approves-truth-serum-james-holmes

Something or other about the right to remain silent...?

Brought to you by the Big Pharma Lobby, "we have a pill for everything and you'll be having them all shoved down your throat soon enough."

People are insane if they stand for this. Gitmo without a fair trial or any trial. Warrant-less wiretapping.... Then people get upset when they can't get out of jail quickly for what they deem to be "all wrong," or otherwise "a mistake the system made." Also, your public defender / appointed counsel is paid horridly by the state and not reimbursed for the many $10 per up to 5 minute phone calls from inside the jail that are recorded and listened to by the prosecution so no, they aren't going to answer when you call, because if they did, then they'd have a $600/month phone bill and everything said would be used against you....

You are the "criminals" people, yes you. Don't think I don't know you probably don't have a criminal record; this applies to you. It will determine how and if the government can do things to you even and especially when you don't want it to.

I cannot tell you how many times I hear, "They can't do that!!!" Yup.... They're gonna.

I hope this gets kicked in the teeth on appeal, I really do.

In the meantime, keep demanding politicians get "tough on crime," and wonder why everything keeps getting worse. [sigh]

[Leafsnail]

We don't have a truth serum.  The narcotic interrogation could maybe help determine whether someone is insane or not now, but there is no medical evidence to suggest it would actually help extract the truth from people.  It may get you a confession, but that's because the drugs make you more impressionable.

[ChairmanPoo]

It wouldn't help with that either because what someone says under the influence is not really vinculating. At the ER when someone comes with an overdose or an overdose attempt psychiatrists wait until the dude comes down to make a through evaluation

[SalmonGod]

In the meantime, keep demanding politicians get "tough on crime," and wonder why everything keeps getting worse. [sigh]

This is one thing that really, really infuriates me about people.  When it comes to crime, it seems like so many people want everyone else who is ever accused of anything to burn.  I, unfortunately, got involved in a discussion at work last week with a couple people who honestly believed we should force criminals into gladiator games, because 'it's the only contribution they're capable of making to society'.  When I brought up a host of factors explaining why most criminals don't deserve anything like that, their stonewall response was "NOPE.  DON'T CARE WHAT THE EXCUSE IS.  YOU ALWAYS HAVE A CHOICE NOT TO COMMIT A CRIME.  THEY'RE JUST PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO RAPE AND MURDER."

What astounds me is at other times I've had conversations with both of the main proponents of this thing about their friends and family who were getting screwed by the brokenness of the justice system, so they should understand how misguided such an extreme of vindictiveness is.  It seems to me like as soon as most people hear the word "criminal" and it doesn't refer to somebody they know, they go retarded with bloodthirsty insanity.  Their grip on reality gets displaced by every stereotype of pure evil they've ever been exposed to.

In general, I'm realizing more and more lately that people always assume the worst possible thing about strangers by default, and I'm beginning to think this is one of the biggest problems with the world.  There could be a dozen excusable explanations as to someone else's behavior, but most people will zero in on the one explanation that makes the other an asshole deserving of retribution.  They'll then set about enacting retribution, usually in passive aggressive ways that make everyone's life a daily hell and create a cycle of cultural self-reinforcement of this negative world view.

[Max White]

Criminal, terrorist, communist, witch. People loose their ability to think rationally once you are accused of a crime.

I think it is an evolutionary response. When we are so willing to condemn anybody who doesn't fit into a very specific stereotype, it quickly culls out minorities, leaving only the homogeneous mass. The more open minded get killed off by the close minded leading to a drift towards fear and paranoia.

[Frumple]

That last bit's actually a known phenomena in the field of sociology (and probably psych, too), though I forget exactly what it's called. Or if it has a particular name or something... probably, but eh. But yeah, folks tend to single-dimensionalize, if you will, people that aren't them or theirs. Naturally, if it happens to them or people they're close to, the tune changes and it's a complicated situation and there's lots of reasons for X or Y to happen and etc., so forth, so on. It just seems like it's rather difficult for a lot of people to make the connection that there's that sort of complicated situation for... well, pretty much everyone.

It's a tendency that's possible to break, but it takes training of some sort for most people. S'one of the reasons teaching psych/sociology (and quite possibly the mechanical aspects of philosophy -- rhetoric, logic, analysis) to folks is generally a pretty good idea, though the general youth of the former fields makes anything systematic still difficult to implement.

On the personal level, something in me's broke and I've never really been capable of feeling anything positive from that sort of spite. Other folks seem to get some kind of charge from certain negative emotions or demonizing other people and I just... don't. Haven't been able to. Don't exactly miss the capability but it makes comprehension hard at times