the Oregonian reports on important things
January 8, 2009
Long time no see, blog! To my fellow bloggers- if you’d like to add a description of yourself/your interests/ your work to the “contributors” page, feel free. If I know you well I might write about you myself… in that case, feel free to edit it/get mad at me.
I found a good thesis-fodder Oregonian article today… relevant for me and not you, but I’m sure you’ll find it interesting. My thesis (about prostitution, masculinity, governmentality…) in part deals with policing in Portland OR, ideas about criminality, and how “criminals” are defined and profiled. Apparently since 2003 the Portland police have had a secret “most arrested list” of the 35 people in the city most frequently arrested for petty/non-violent crimes. When the ACLU and a few attorneys declared the list unconstitutional, an investigation confirmed that it had grown from 35 to almost 400 people. I expect (though the article does not mention this) that many of those on the list are people who are “suspected or known prostitutes,” who are frequently arrested on property violation charges (loitering, etc), or drug-related charges if the “intent to solicit” charge is a stretch for a given situation.
Read the article here.
i think it’s fascinating how the rationalization for keeping this list is that it helps to provide better/faster/more services, like “beds” and “drug treatment,” to arrested people whose names are on it. criminalization + paternalism = yet again, the theme? this may be old news.
one of my informants has a website which states, “i will under no circumstances provide sexual services of any kind.” i would really like to have a conversation sometime about the lack of/ difference between your informants and the clients of mine; i feel that there are more complicated things to say about this than it seems.
we could write about it if i figure out how to make myself a name to post with. help?
-oshkoshb’gosh
is that h mae?
In relation to this post, I’ve been thinking about what this expose will do to recent and probably half-hearted efforts (in Portland, re: prostitution and vice scares) to post online the names and photos of men arrested but not yet convicted for “soliciting prostitutes”… some cities (chicago, oaklahoma city) have done it and some non-governmental groups have made similar efforts in other cities. It’s a pretty obvious civil rights violation, given that the information is posted before convictions are made. And this is troubling- at least in Chicago, all but 2 of 20ish men posted on the website for arrests made within the last 30 days are not white. There could be a few reasons for this… the first being straight up racism and police profiling (when a white man in a nice car picks up a prostitute, is that really a blow to the neighborhood’s “quality of life?” After all, if we take NYC as an example, isn’t quality of life measured by convenience- wash and fold delivered to your door! rice pudding! delivered! at midnight! no, that white guy in the nice car was just taking advantage of what the gentrifying neighborhood has got to offer. Eventually the prostitutes will be pushed off the streets, more yoga studios will open and he will resort to internet-based in-call escort services, longing for the days when he could just pick up a cheap woman down by the bodega.) I digress. Racial profiling of johns. Second, when white men who are clients actually ARE arrested, we all know it doesn’t take *that* much to pay off the Chicago police. Third, the whole thing was pretty well publicized. Men who believe they have got a lot at stake tend to be sort of paranoid, hypervigilant. But if a man’s got a lot of money, unless he really has a street sex fetish, he is way more likely to have taken to the internet long ago.