For nearly 30 years, Rhode Island policed prostitution it didn’t prohibit. My new paper, “The Smallest State’s Big Experiment,” revisits that history through Alvin Roth’s latest book, Moral Economics. Now on SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7590359
Here’s the abstract:
Rhode Island’s accidental decriminalization of prostitution in 1980 is typically told as the story of a legal change that went unnoticed for more than two decades. This review of Alvin Roth’s latest book, Moral Economics, challenges that standard account and explores its implications for Roth’s argument that markets need social support to flourish. Drawing on court records, contemporaneous news reports, arrest statistics, and legislative proceedings, I show that the statutory change was noticed almost immediately. Prostitution-related arrests continued, not because police and prosecutors were ignorantly arresting and charging sex workers and clients under a statute that no longer existed, but because the legal system adapted using tools – primarily the loitering prohibition that survived the 1980 rewrite – that have long been used to police behavior and individuals considered repugnant. After a 2003 judicial ruling closed an important enforcement avenue against indoor sex work and vaulted the market into the open, a coalition formed around trafficking concerns that eventually paved the way for recriminalization in 2009. Rhode Island’s accidental experiment with decriminalized sex work provided neither the deliberately designed regulatory framework nor the political backing that could build the type of social support that Roth insists (correctly, in my view) markets need to function well.