Yes-prostitutes should be licensed and closely monitored-this is a crime that offends only Jesus Freaks mostly and is an attempt to control peoples sex lives but I'm more concerned about people ripping me off rather than if some guy visits a hooker.

It will not make any difference. On the contrary, it will create a viable, legal employment option and make it look acceptable. It is a scourge to any society. It always has been and will always be. Not to mention that it is the safest and easiest way to contract a STD and bring it home and infect spouses and children. I am sure the proponents of such a measure have their reasons for it.

Organized crime, organized religion, and the prison industrial complex seem to agree that everything that's gross, exploitive, sleazy, sinful or immoral should be criminalized.

  Should it be decriminalized? Absolutely. Is prostitution a sleazy, exploitative business full of damaged and damaging people? Absolutely, but its criminalization is yet another remnant of the puritanical, hypocritical zeitgeist of our ancestors that we're still unable to completely shed centuries later. What it comes down to, for me, is that we're either a free society or we aren't. If 2 consenting adults decide they want to make their sexual interaction a business proposition, and they're doing it in a reasonably private place, what interest is it to anyone else? Yes, the prostitute probably does have a history of sexual-physical-drug abuse and family dysfunction-- so, too, in all probability, does the stripper or the porno actress. Cigarettes will absolutely kill you but they're legal, as they should be. Liquor will kill you faster than marijuana but it's legal, as it should be. Marijuana can have medicinal benefits and is certainly no more damaging than cigarettes or liquor overall, but it's illegal, which is wrong. We're still living with the results of our failed national experiment with Prohibition. Thirty years ago, you could theoretically be imprisoned on a gambling offense, the same offense that the Government nowadays is making tax money off of. I absolutely don't quibble with GenghisTheHun's description of the world of prostitution as a place of degredation. I spent a week in Amsterdam when I was younger, and I can tell you that the red-light district there was only marginally less depressing than NY's 42nd Street (back in the day before it became Disneyland), or Hell's Kitchen (the Yuppies have re-named it "Clinton" as if that will somehow erase its often sordid history). Let me put it in another context-- I think anyone who appears in a porno movie, male or female, has something inherently wrong with them. I'm absolutely not a prude or in favor of censorship, I'm not a priest or a psychiatrist, but I do feel anyone willing to perform the most intimate act imaginable on a movie/TV screen, often under degrading circumstances, for an unseen audience of paying masturbators has something mentally/emotionally wrong with them. Should it be illegal? No (and it isn't, although in some ways pornography is still a semi-legal gray area). As long as minors aren't involved, and the adults are acting in a consensual manner for like-minded adults, who in hell am I to impose my own private sense of "morality" on the participants? Again, this is what a truly free society has to be about. Even after 200+ years of our American experiment in "democracy", it never really seems that a large portion of the American people truly get the concept of freedom. They'll parrot the word over and over again by rote without really knowing what it means, or at least that's how it seems to me. Freedom often means being able to make choices that are ultimately destructive for us as individuals. A hard pill to swallow, maybe, but one that we really need to.

  Hell yeah.1.Eliot Spitzer will still be a shmuck

                 2.Best way to keep minors,pimps out of it & control disease.

                 3.Government morally punked out of these issues by legalizing gambling(3 casinos in Detroit)-actually about the only succesful thing going in Sh(MoTown)right now.

Definetely not.  First off the number of patrons will increase - increasing the number of STD's circling around out there which will get into the rotation of people who by and large have a limited number of sexual partners.  Secondly, legalizing this would ruin a lot of young women's lives, who would view this is a legitamite way to make a living.  It's a very dangerous profession for a woman and many regret this decision later in life.  Many people go through tough times but there are other options like waiting tables.

This is an extremely unsavory, vicious and really terrible "business."  Many of the women are forced into the business through various psychological devices or use of drugs or both. More often than not, run away girls are found, befriended and then pressed into service. Drug abuse, violence, disease and crime are rampant.

I laugh at the libertarians who obviously have had no experience in dealing with people in this vice, who act like these women are merely businesswomen who need to be free from govenment regulations and a utopia will result.

I suppose we are moving in that direction since society is so obviously going down the drain.  I wonder what the puritanical regimes of Mohammed and Juan are going to think about this type of behavior fifty years hence?

I don't understand why it's illegal.  I thought America was about capitalism.

Given that current N.Y. Gov. Eliot Spitzer has recently been accused of being a customer of a prostitution ring, this may be an appropriate time to look anew at the appropriateness of laws making prostitution illegal. I think the world's oldest "profession" should be decriminalized. It's a moralistic hangover from our puritanical religiosity. There's nothing inherently wrong with it. Just one more example of certain religious folk trying to impose their morality on the rest of us. They're entitled to believe what they want, but just because they believe in something doesn't make it right for everyone else. That's a hard realization for them, I know, but the rest of us don't want to be bullied with beliefs we don't share. If any legal restrictions at all should be placed on it, it should be licensed, so that the health of the prostitutes can be monitored, and the "industry" can move out of the dark shadows and into safer places. Pimps and attendant crimes would be largely eliminated. We could stop wasting our tax dollars trying to enforce laws against it and either leave those tax dollars in our pockets or put it to better use.