"Wanna date?"
What this zombie of a woman, with her tattered clothes, stringy frame, ghost-white skin and bedraggled face, really wants to know is, do I want sex? She's been staring at me since I pulled into the 7-Eleven at Jones and Lake Mead, repeatedly poking her tongue against the side of her mouth, simulating fellatio.
"Naw," I say.
Zombie-lady gets pissed. Calls me "lame." Says there are plenty other available "tricks" (customers). Indeed there are. A guy in a dark pickup truck parks, walks in, buys cigarettes and leaves. They lock eyes. She pokes her tongue against her mouth. Sold. He nods. She gets in. They're off. The world's oldest profession continues unabated in Sin City.
Vegas has been synonymous with prostitution since Block 16 (Ogden and Stewart, and First and Second streets) served as the town's red-light district in the early 1900s, and has, over the years, become one giant Tenderloin.
Metro vice cops say they're seeing more prostitutes like zombie-lady: bold, direct, willing to make the first move—traits long associated with the come-up-to-your-car East Coast hookers profiled in HBO documentaries like Pimps, Hookers and Johns.
And they're discovering more species of skin-hustler: sex slaves and $1,000-per-hour escorts; strippers selling ass on the side and juveniles turning tricks in Budget Suites parking lots; streetwalkers scoping for johns (Fremont Street) and neighborhood hookers serving clients out of run-down homes (H Street in West Las Vegas) and apartments (Sierra Vista and Cambridge); high-gloss vixens swooping in for large conventions and regular-looking girls seducing men in hotel bars and lounges; billboards offering women "direct to you" and "spas" doubling as brothels; hand jobs in massage parlors and blow jobs in back alleys; threesomes in swingers clubs and hookups facilitated by myspace.com; junkies trading sex for drugs and teenagers trading sex for shelter.
And while they're arresting more prostitutes than ever—4,000-plus annually since 2003—the problem continues to grow, exacerbated partially by weak laws (little or no jail time for prostitutes, johns and pimps) and largely by a judicial system that spreads cases among eight justices of the peace (preventing uniformity in sentencing) and lawyers without specialized training to handle these cases.
All the more reason for Clark County to create a prostitution court.
That is, a court with three or four judges who can establish sentencing guidelines not only for prostitutes, but pimps and johns. A court with prosecutors and defense attorneys sensitive to the nuances of these cases. A court that, like the mental-health court established last year, marshals social services in one convenient place.
Clark County needs such a court because police can't arrest the problem away. Because there are an estimated 600 HIV-positive prostitutes working in the Valley. Because this city is one of 11 that received federal funds last year to stop sex trafficking. Because in 2004, Operation Stop uncovered 207 girls lured into prostitution by pimps or other girls. Because decades of misinformation about prostitution's legality in Vegas has created a What Happens Here Stays Here attitude among those who use sex workers to suit their needs—I can do whatever I want because you're a hooker, and I'm paying you. Because prostitutes continue to be murdered each year.
"The problem is getting bigger and bigger," Metro Sgt. Gil Shannon says. "It has grown visibly on the street and in the hotels, particularly in the last month and a half because a [county] loitering [for the purposes of prostitution] ordinance for the purpose of curtailing prostitution was found to be unconstitutional. Luckily, on May 30, it was reactivated."
(The Nevada Supreme Court ruled that the ordinance—which makes it a misdemeanor to solicit or entice another person into prostitution, and was nixed by a justice of the peace last year—is constitutional. Metro drew fire from the American Civil Liberties Union in 2004 for videotaping instances of solicitation prostitution, then erasing tapes and withholding them from defense attorneys.)
Clark County needs a prostitution court for much the same reason mental-health advocates pressed for a court for the mentally ill: to relieve pressure on the Valley's shaky social-service infrastructure. Some mentally ill folks need treatment more than a jail cell; same for some prostitutes. A small portion of the mentally ill commit a bulk of crimes; a small number of prostitutes account for a large number of arrests. Help them and you go a long way toward reducing crime. The mentally ill crowd emergency hospital rooms, draining the number of beds available for accident survivors, gunshot victims and trauma patients. The more prostitutes you have in jail, the fewer cells for violent criminals. Thus begins a never-ending cycle that taxpayers will ultimately be asked to solve: The state is spending $150 million on a 109-bed mental hospital. Law-enforcement officials are clamoring for more jail space due to overcrowding at the county lockup.
D.C. Superior Court operates what's likely the nation's only full-fledged prostitution court. Dan Cipullo, director of that city's superior court criminal division, helped create it three years ago after officials discovered prostitution was a citywide plague.
"Everywhere we went, we heard there was a problem with prostitution. We thought it was related to one small part of the city, in Logan Circle near downtown Washington," he says. "This is a city that is known for violence, and people were finding used condoms and needles in front of their houses. They feared for their children's safety."
D.C. court officials discovered three species of prostitute: the homegrown hooker, the frequent visitor and those trafficked in via a prostitution ring stretching from Miami to Montreal. Ideally, Cipullo says, there should've been three legal approaches to the issue instead of one—hook 'em and book 'em.
"We got 1,200 to 1,500 cases of prostitution annually. We had five or six different judges getting cases and everyone was handling it differently," Cipullo says. "We have a community court in East River, a largely black and poor community. We didn't realize there was a prostitution issue over there. Lots of folks were doing it for drugs or money, and they'd do it outside while the children were in the house. So we instituted a program within the community court."
According to the D.C. Superior Court website, the community court's purpose is "to develop a system for handling quality-of-life offenses such as shoplifting, prostitution, environmental crimes, destruction of property, theft and drug possession based on methods of problem-solving rather than traditional case processing."
By swiftly moving clients through the system and putting them into self-help programs, the court aims to reduce the number of people in jail, thus reducing the number of arrests, which means cops can spend more time with community policing.
The rest of the city's prostitution cases were combined into one courtroom and put in front of one judge, who worked with defense attorneys, prosecutors and pretrial agencies. Cipullo says this has created consistency in sentencing, probation and pretrial diversion. Prostitutes receive psychological assessments, therapy for issues such as sexual and psychological abuse and a bevy of other services to help them transition from sex work.
"It [the prostitution court] has made everyone aware that this is a lifestyle that some women want to get out of, that some women don't want to get out of and that some need jail time to get out of," Cipullo says.
The court has given the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys flexibility in attacking problems. Take out-of-town prostitutes. After one or two offenses, they're not only told to skedaddle or face serious jail time, but they're also given a promise: Stay clean for a year (no arrests) and the charges will be dropped.
Johns get the option of attending a one-day, eight-hour awareness program where they hear from a psychologist specializing in sexual addiction, survivors of prostitution, health professionals, police, prosecutors and local residents. Portions of their $300 fee support people trying to leave prostitution. Last year, 500 people completed the john school in D.C. So far, Cipullo says, only one had been rearrested.
After finding out that members of D.C.'s large population of transgender prostitutes were selling themselves for money to buy expensive hormone treatment, Cipullo says the prostitution court worked with a local gay health clinic to educate them on the dangers of risky sexual behavior. Perhaps the best program, certainly the most intense, is Bridges, a three-month outpatient program that meets five days a week and immerses prostitutes in education and offers help in addressing addictions, depression and problems. The classes are for prostitutes "who have not previously benefited from diversion in any jurisdiction, who do not have a pending case involving a violent misdemeanor or any felony offense and who are not on probation or parole for a violent misdemeanor or any felony offense."
Cipullo says there's no way to calculate the overall success of the prostitute court. Officials haven't studied recidivism and say arrests aren't a good barometer—they rise and fall based on police resources. What's unequivocal, he says, is that D.C. is better off with the court: "If you want to get a pulse on what's going on in the community, you should create a prostitution court. Spreading things out [judicially] really doesn't give you the chance to understand the extent of the problem."
If he can't get a prostitution court, Metro Lt. Curtis Williams says he'd settle for a prosecutor dedicated to handling prostitution issues in Clark County. (There's been some interest in creating a special prosecutor position to handle juvenile prostitution cases.)
But don't expect either anytime soon. The Justice Department denied a $30,000 Metro grant to pay to train a prosecutor for vice-related cases. Michael Sommermeyer, spokesman for the Eighth District Judicial Court, which handles criminal cases in Clark County, says state lawmakers would have to create a local prostitution court. It'd be up to county government to fund it.
"We're so bogged down that I can't see us letting go of any judge, much less three judges," he says.
It all comes downs to resources, says Assistant County Manager Elizabeth Quillan, a former county public defender and Las Vegas Municipal Court prosecutor. A prostitution court would not only siphon a judge (or judges), but the attorneys who handle domestic violence, drunken driving, drug and other criminal cases. Drug counseling, AIDS testing and a school for johns are already available, so there's no need to duplicate services. Because most of the prostitutes arrested in the county are high-end call girls, not street-level hookers who get arrested, get out and get arrested again, you'd be hard-pressed to replicate the success of the mental-health court.
"High-end call girls aren't taking up hospital beds or jail cells. The mentally ill were taking up hospital beds in emergency rooms and triaging them created a situation where everybody benefited. This hooker court would be such a drain on resources," says Quillan, noting that county district attorneys and public defenders handle cases from Henderson, North Las Vegas and six other municipal jurisdictions.
"I was in [county district] court every day for four years and didn't see a lot of prostitution cases. I saw more when I was in the city. This might make sense—maybe even a special calendar for prostitution cases—in the city, but not in the county."
City officials failed to respond by press time.
Quillan is amenable to special services for juvenile prostitution. (The FBI also ranked Las Vegas as one of 14 cities with the highest incidence of child and teen prostitution.)
If judges or prosecutors saw how many times some prostitutes cycle through the criminal justice system, Williams says, they would support some sort of systemic change. Within a month, one girl can be arrested four or five times. Within six months, 10 to 20 times. Once you get a prostitution court, he says, then you can reform the system from top to bottom, starting with laws.
"The way D.C. has it established now is that the penalty outweighs the crime. It's a reversal here: There's a big opportunity for prostitutes to be able to plea bargain or get charges dismissed," Williams says. "When prostitutes get that secure feeling, when they know that getting arrested or getting fined is not a big risk, they have no fear."
Williams would like harsher penalties for johns, who are typically cited and let go, and pimps, who rarely get prosecuted, often because their subjects are too scared to drop the dime. "I'd look at arresting johns and somehow publicize their names to discourage them from being patrons of prostitutes."
While the hotel boom has been a boon to investors and shareholders, it's made vice cops' jobs more difficult, Williams says. Every hotel has a nightclub, bar or lounge, some have two or three of each, and wherever you have these venues, you have prostitutes. There aren't enough cops to arrest them all.
"We could use a vice bureau with 100-plus cops and it still wouldn't be enough to handle the situation," Williams says. " So we train cops in other areas on vice procedures to help us."
Sgt. Gil Shannon says prostitution is on the rise in the major hotels at the south end of the Strip and in the Tropicana and Valley View area; meanwhile, business at the traditional hot spots—Boulder Highway, Fremont Street, Sierra Vista and Cambridge—is as brisk as ever.
It's at the motel-heavy Tropicana and Valley View zone that Shannon is noticing a different type of prostitute. Some pimps are having their prettiest girls work the streets and encouraging them to seek out customers and not wait to be chosen. They're called Hollywoods, he says, because they wear miniskirts exposing their butts and want to be seen. Definitely a tougher breed of prostitute, one unafraid of jail time and entrenched in the lifestyle.
Still, he's convinced a prostitution court would help those just like them.
"I think we need one," he says.