SPEEDING tickets and traffic schools. The two words go together almost as well as peanut butter and jelly. In order to avoid the ever-ominous points on your license and increases in insurance payments, attending a few weeks of traffic school seems like a nice, easy way out. Even with the tests attendees are required to take at the end of class, there is never any guarantee that they will leave having become completely honest, law-abiding drivers.
Washington, D.C., recently has begun a curriculum which works along the same lines as traffic school but has nothing to do with driving. When a man is on his first arrest for soliciting a prostitute, he can agree to pay $300 to attend a day of lectures concerning his actions and the consequences thereof. At the end of this day, his case is dismissed, he avoids court and his record stays clean ("Fallen Men," The Washington Post, Aug. 28). This is absurd. Without a guarantee of a 100 percent success rate, our tax money should not be spent on vain attempts to educate men about the dangers of prostitution.
Detective Mark Gilkey, Supervisor of D.C.'s anti-prostitution unit and head speaker at this "John School," has noted that "this is a morality issue: Prostitution is not a victimless crime." We cannot be so deluded as to believe that one measly day's worth of lectures will really have such an impact on men who were already desperate enough to cruise the streets looking for prostitutes. It's not very convincing. Either extend the curriculum to make it more grueling and really cause some repentance, or stop offering offenders the easy way out.
The workers in the classroom do try their best to fit all the issues into a one-day course. Scare tactics are used. The men are told that in a few years' time the city will post their photos on the Internet as offenders. They are also told that many streetwalkers have tested positive for HIV, and even that some of the men have probably paid for services with prostitutes who were really well-disguised men.
Sounds scary enough, but with an ounce of common sense most anyone would know that soliciting a prostitute has many emotional and physical risks involved. Yet it continually happens. Gilkey has reported that of the 250 graduates of the course, none have been arrested again for soliciting. They might have just learned to be craftier; habitual solicitors know the tricks to avoiding arrest, such as asking women to get in the car before they begin negotiating. Just because they haven't been caught doesn't mean the course has successfully convinced these men never to solicit a prostitute again. Our tax money shouldn't be spent on a potentially useless class for men who solicit prostitutes.
During the mid-day break of the course, one of the men said in an interview that although he decided not to tell his wife about his solicitation and arrest, he still has ambiguous feelings about whether what he did was wrong. He said, "I know I broke the law, and I'm ashamed that I broke my marriage vows. But this is a biological issue rather than a moral issue -- men are weak that way." If the men continue to use their "weakness" as an excuse and fail to see their wrongdoing halfway through the day-long course, then it seems highly unlikely they will do a complete turnaround in the next few hours of discussion.
If the course is going to continue and its creators are to have highly optimistic hopes for its students, at the very least, the offenders' money -- and not the taxpayers' -- should be used to fund it. As of now, the $300 fee, paid by each offender to attend the class, is made as a donation to the Eleuthera Institute, a charity to help prostitutes get off the streets. This is a benevolent idea, but in the meantime it's wasting the good money of many non-solicitors without showing any worthwhile results.
If there is any hope of continuing the class with results, the curriculum should change. The course should span more than just a one-day period. This would make it inconvenient for many of the attendees and would thus begin to punish them for their illegal acts. Also, the course should entail more than just sitting and listening to a lecture. There should be more personal lessons which would affect each of the class members and hit home the fact that what they tried to do was wrong and should not be attempted again. Finally, it should be marked somewhere on the solicitors' records that they attended the course but should still be watched in case of future solicitations. Soliciting is illegal and offenders should not be let off as easily as they currently are with this one-day course option.
Being allowed to go to "school" in order to avoid permanent damage to one's records in regard to breaking the law is an easy way out. Traffic violators already view driving school as an easy way out and that involves more than one class and a test. Letting solicitors off with a day-long course that has no guarantee of reforming them but does allow their records to stay untarnished is a foolishly optimistic approach to solving prostitution issues. D.C.'s anti-prostitution unit should change the structure of the course or stop using taxpayer money for it, because the course is a waste of everybody's time.
(Alex Roosenburg's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at aroosenburg@cavalierdaily.com.)
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