Prostitutes’ customers to be sent off to school
Diversion class aims to change behavior of johns
County leaders hope by the end of the year to open a “john school” of sorts: a daylong voluntary diversion class designed to be a wake-up call for the first-time (typically male) offender who picks up adult prostitutes.
Modeled after the nation’s oldest john school in San Francisco, the county will refer offenders to treatment when necessary and teach
them about the crime’s impact on both the women involved and
the community.
them about the crime’s impact on both the women involved and
the community.
“The kids who get out of school around 82nd (Avenue) are propositioned” by the johns, says JR Ujifusa, the deputy district attorney who has prosecuted neighborhood prostitution crimes for the past two and a half years. The johns’ activities damage community livability, he says.
“They have sex in parking lots; we find condoms and needles; pimps fight against each other. When you think of how 82nd Avenue’s been associated with these crimes, we want to get away from that.”
Upon completion of the john school, the convicted offender will get the charge erased from his record after six months, if he does not re-offend.
The catch is that to participate, the offender will have to pony up $1,000 to take the class. The fee will go directly toward paying the courts, police and victim services so that the program can fund itself.
Brian Wong, chairman of the Montavilla Neighborhood Association, thinks that price is steep, but not high enough.
“The cost to society is extreme,” he says. “The pimp’s job is to inflict violence to the woman so she’ll do a $40 transaction with anybody. She has no choice when she’s out there.”
Wong says he and other neighbors are hopeful the john school will put a dent in a crime that saw a dramatic spike two summers ago, just after the city allowed its long-running “prostitution-free zones” to sunset due to constitutional concerns.
After the zones ended, neighbors held town hall meetings and police hit hot spots, mostly on 82nd Avenue near Stark and Sandy, but also on West Burnside, around the entertainment district.
The magnitude of the problem has decreased, but prostitution still persists, Ujifusa says. He sees 80 to 100 arrests per year for solicitation, the majority of them involving first-time offenders.
LifeWorks Northwest, the nonprofit mental health, addiction and treatment provider that serves survivors of the sex trade, would host the john school at its Gresham site and be the lead social service partner.
Jeri Williams, a former street worker who is now a program coordinator for the city’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement, is glad to hear work is under way to start the john school.
“It’s like we have this triangle – the pimps, the women and the johns,” she says. “The johns go out and break the laws, but they’re untouchable.”
Currently, a man who’s arrested for soliciting sex for the first time would typically receive a sentence of community service or probation, significantly less than the penalties Washington and other states impose. State legislators will introduce a bill next year to make those laws stricter.
Williams says prostitution is often thought of as a victimless crime. From her experience working along 82nd Avenue in 1989, she knows otherwise. “I got stabbed and left for dead,” she says. “They beat you up a lot; they do a lot of lying. Unless you’re forced to be out there, you’re not going to be out there.”
Conflicting results in the past
The john school concept isn’t new to Portland – or the rest of the country.
Portland has seen two start and fall by the wayside before – one in the early 1990s called the Sexual Exploitation Education Project, which folded after two years; and one in 1999 run by Patricia Barrera, a longtime anti-prostitution activist whose effort lasted three years and had to end because her co-organizer fell ill.
“We had them for six hours on a Saturday afternoon,” Barrera says of the johns. “My conclusion was there is no one-size-fits-all.”
In fact, Barrera says she’s skeptical about the county’s latest attempt because she thinks it’s not strong enough. She’d rather see offenders take part in the type of 52-week “batterers’ intervention treatment” mandated for assault crimes in the county. The length of the treatment in her model would be tailored to each offender’s needs.
“Some are sex offenders and need treatment,” she says. “I’m highly concerned about when you look at the extensive intervention the women are required (to undergo) – that there’s an inequity.”
Ujifusa notes that prostitutes who see their first arrest, once the john school starts, will be sentenced to probation. That sentence will include a mandatory one-day introduction to the services at LifeWorks Northwest, with an option to continue if they choose.
Michael Shively had also been an early skeptic of the how effective a one-day diversion program could be, but now says the data has proven it works.
The researcher, based in Cambridge, Mass., is considered the nation’s foremost expert on john schools, having produced an extensive report on San Francisco’s “First Offender Prostitution Program” in 2008, 12 years after it started.
Portland will be one of the cities modeling its program after San Francisco’s. Shively’s study concluded that the program reduced recidivism for half of its participants.
He says the data also concluded that the program was cost-effective, operating at no cost to taxpayers and generating about $1 million for recovery programs for prostitutes escaping the lifestyle. And he found that the San Francisco program was transferable, having been successfully replicated in 12 other U.S. sites and adapted in 25 others over the past decade.
“When I started the evaluation of the San Francisco school, I would’ve bet you literally everything I had it wasn’t going to have a measured impact on re-offending,” he says. “There’s a 50-year social science literature on trying to treat people who commit crime or educating them. There’s a principle of effectiveness – intervention needs to be intense, sustained over months over repeatedly working on people, individual responsive – people have to be assessed for their needs, and one size doesn’t fit all, and then aftercare … there needs to be some sort of transition.”
The john school model – which is basically one-way communication for six to eight hours, with no individual tailoring and no follow-up – met none of those principles, he says.
Yet, after the data so strongly proved that the model worked, Shively says, he reconsidered that 50-year-old social science theory.
The men who get arrested for soliciting sex are not hardened criminals, he says: “They’re far more similar to the general population than to the prison or jail population. … Most of them aren’t trying to hurt anyone, although they do. They’re trying to get their needs met and they’re doing it in a bad way.”
Shively says the offenders’ notions about why prostitutes sell their bodies is “messed up” and reinforced by the sex workers themselves, who are likely forced to make money out of violence, homelessness, addictions, past abuse and a host of societal ills that make them vulnerable to the lifestyle.
“When you really start digging around,” he adds, “then it starts making some sense why if you basically give them a wake-up call and give them some new info, quite a few of the guys are going to get the message.”
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