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In March, the Metro Police Department had a minor publicity issue when one of its own was arrested in an anti-prostitution sting targeting clients.\u00a0 Officer Robert A. Schmidt<\/a> was charged with solicitation after agreeing to pay an undercover female officer $80 for sex.\u00a0 Solicitation is a misdemeanor in the District, however, solicitation tends to be treated completely differently within both the police department and the courts.\u00a0\u00a0 Like in most other U.S. cities with anti-john laws, D.C. still tends to focus most of its resources on policing the sex workers themselves.\u00a0 Since most workers are woman-identified, these sort of tactics have been declared to be discriminatory<\/a> on a few select occasions, though not most.\u00a0 Women are the largest group arrested on charges of prostitution with transgender workers being the second largest groups.\u00a0 Male workers and clients<\/a> only make up about 2-3 arrests per night.\u00a0 In recent years, a few U.S. cities, most notably San Francisco<\/a>, have instituted reforms targeting clients in order to cut off demand for sex work altogether.\u00a0 In Sweden, authorities have even gone so far as to decriminalize sex work itself, while criminalizing the act of solicitation.\u00a0 The intent, however, remains the same: abolition.\u00a0 Even when tactics target male clients and not workers explicitly, abolition still sends the statement that sex work is wrong and inherently exploitative; workers are victims worthy of pity rather than a safe and fair wage.<\/p>\n With the intent of seeming more even handed in enforcing the law against engaging in and soliciting prostitution, D.C. utilizes \u201crehabilitation\u201d programs for individuals charged as clients of prostitution called \u201cjohn schools\u201d as a means of teach clients about the \u2018inherent\u2019 harms of prostitution like \u201ccrime, fear, and health disorders\u201d. School<\/a> is one day long and consists of testimony from \u201ca psychologist, survivors of prostitution, prosecutors, police, health professionals, local residents, and business owners\u201d.\u00a0 The finger is pointed at these clients instead of pimps, police, and other abusers; it also virtually ignores systems, which not only perpetuate the practice but make it dangerous. These schools, with a fine, are offered in lieu of the typical penalties for first time offenders.\u00a0 Officer Schmidt\u2019s charge was dismissed after he completed \u201cjohn school\u201d and his record is clean.\u00a0 It is a safe bet that workers arrested that same night had a different experience.<\/p>\n Despite the fact that the law itself is written indiscriminately, policing practices and the ability to expunge one\u2019s record and avoid jail time through \u201cjohn schools\u201d signify that anti-prostitution policy remains discriminatory in practice.\u00a0 Authorities have acknowledged a legitimate interest in keeping clients, especially middle-class white men, out of jail and their records clean, yet, the state seems disinterested in considering that the lives of workers would also be improved by not having convictions, police harassment or their daily lives disrupted by jail time or fines.\u00a0 The practice of the law quite literally values the lives of men over women.\u00a0 Low arrest rates of clients, likewise, means that there are generally low recidivism rates compared to workers and recidivism often leads to harsher sentencing.\u00a0 Workers who are unable to pay increasingly high fines are more likely to spend as many as 180 days in jail.\u00a0 Street workers often come from poorer socio-economic backgrounds and often are parents or are supporting others.\u00a0 The criminal justice system tries to see these individuals apart from their relationship to the larger community and fails to acknowledge that jail time is an unpaid absence from work.\u00a0 It\u2019s a loss of income for the worker and often for their families that is further complicated by court fees and fines, which require them to work more.\u00a0 Separation from family, especially children, has problematic short and long-term complications. Children whose parents serve time in prison are often left vulnerable to higher incidences of abuse, neglect and rape; if unable to stay with extended family they are placed in state care not because their parents are necessarily unfit but because they were working.\u00a0 How can advocates of criminalization claim that these practices are in the best interest of women?<\/p>\n Imprisonment is especially complicated in regards to transgender workers, a group, which has been disproportionately targeted for harassment and arrest in D.C.\u00a0 With the passage of the amendment adding gender identity and expression to the D.C. Human Rights Act<\/a> in 2007, the Department of Corrections has had to change its intake and housing policy<\/a>.\u00a0 Previously there was no system in place to change a person\u2019s gender in the criminal records database, even if they had undergone transitional surgery and\/or had their name and gender legally changed.\u00a0 This caused many women to be automatically placed into holding cells with males and led to high incidences of sexual assault<\/a>.\u00a0 The new policy ostensibly would allow for transgender persons to be housed in either the general population or protective custody of the gender they are deemed by the Transgender Committee.\u00a0Transgender inmates must also be allowed access to hormone treatment under the new policy even if they had not started prior to arrest.\u00a0 The new policy also requires strict nondiscrimination.\u00a0 It has yet to be seen, however, how the policy will be carried out and though seemingly benign, the daily reality of imprisonment poses its own dangers.\u00a0 Genitalia are still the primary indicator used for determining housing and it is unlikely that many transwomen would be housed with biological women or that they would even choose to be.\u00a0 Likewise, protective custody is simply euphemistic for solitary confinement; these inmates are placed in single-person cells and only given two hours outside of these cells a day to shower and exercise.\u00a0 Because of this, few knowingly choose protective custody even when they fear violence among the general population.\u00a0 Transgender men and women are not passive victims of a system which hasn\u2019t yet \u2018caught up\u2019, but they have been targets of a system which bent on eliminating them.\u00a0 Disproportionate and violent targeting of transgender workers, as well as all woman-identified workers, sends precisely the signal it intends: abolition.<\/p>\n \n