LOS ANGELES—The movement to decriminalize sex work has now spread to the South, as a Louisiana state representative last week introduced a bill to roll back anti-prostitution laws in that state. Mandie Landry, who represents State House District 91 — located in the city of New Orleans — says the bill is all about getting the government out of individuals’ private lives.
"The younger generation, people my age and younger, don't understand at all how the government could ever enter your bedroom and tell you what to do,” Landry, a Democrat, told local TV station WDSU. “If two people engage in a relationship in their own home, whether they exchange money or not, it's between them."
Landry said that she plans to formally introduce the bill on April 12, when the new Louisiana legislative session gets underway. She introduced a similar bill in 2020, but allowed it to be shelved due to the legislature’s need to focus on issues stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Landry also says that she believes the bill will increase safety for sex workers. Taking away criminal penalties will make it easier for sex workers who have been victims of violence or sex trafficking to report the crimes against them to law enforcement. She added that if the bill passes, she will then introduce legislation to expunge all prior prostitiution-related offenses from sex workers’ criminal records.
She also said that decriminalizing prostitution promotes safe sexual practices overall, because the presence of condoms is often used by police as evidence that a sexual encounter is illegal.
“If that’s evidence of the crime, people who are engaging in the activity are less likely to use them,” she told a local TV news outlet. “That creates more of a public health risk, especially for those who are most at-risk.”
The bill also states that while the United States 50 years ago had an incarceration rate that was roughly equivalent to that in other “Western democracies,” today that rate is five times higher than in comparable countries. Removing criminal penalties for sex work would be a step toward “large-scale decarceration,” in an effort to address “structural inequities that impeded the safety, dignity, and well-being of all individuals especially those most vulnerable to discrimination on the basis of race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, socioeconomic status and citizenship.”
While Nevada remains the only U.S. state to have legal, though highly regulated, sex work, legislators in New York have intrduced a bill to bring decriminalization to that state in 2021, and the current St. Louis mayoral race has featured debate over decriminalizing sex work in that city.
A recent citizen’s petition in Canada appears likely to force the parliament there to debate the sex ork decriminalization issue north of the border as well.
Photo By Louisiana House of Representatives
