The Unclean Will be Jailed, One Way or Another
“Once you've prostituted you can never not have prostituted... Having that many body parts in your body parts, having that many body fluids near you and doing things that are freaky and weird really messes up your ideas of what a relationship looks like, and intimacy.” - ASU Professor Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, Project ROSE
In Phoenix, citizens are being arrested, detained at a church, interrogated and processed without trial or access to a lawyer: Those who meet certain criteria are offered a diversion program. Those who don't, go to prison, according to Molly Crabapple at Vice.com:
In law enforcement, language goes through the looking glass. Lieutenant James Gallagher, the former head of the Phoenix Vice Department, told me that Project ROSE raids were “programs.” The arrests were “contact.” And the sex workers who told Al Jazeera that they had been kidnapped in those windowless church rooms—they were “lawfully detained.”
“Project ROSE is a service opportunity for a population involved in a very complex problem,” Lieutenant Gallagher wrote to me in an email. Sex workers were criminals and victims at once. They were fair game to imprison, as long as they were getting “help.”
The program, according to AZFamily.com, targets Valley sex trafficking. According to the ASU News, it helps victims of prostitution.
Targeting sex trafficking and helping victims sounds nice, but Crabapple's article looks deeper into just how the sites are set:
"Monica was arrested for 'manifesting prostitution,' a statute in the Phoenix municipal code that takes everything from starting conversations with passersby to asking if someone is an undercover cop as proof that you're selling sex."
Which, as the author points out, could constitute something as innocuous as going to the store for some milk... Monica, the detainee mentioned above, is Monica Jones. She was arrested for getting a ride home from a bar. She's also a student at ASU with a history of questioning Professor Roe-Sepowitz's program.
Bethany Bible Church, where they detained the citizens, receives $1,500 per day when in use.
I don't want to be the guy who comes out and says sex trafficking is totally cool, but I can't even start to wrap my head around how it's somehow less uncool to conduct mass arrests, detentions and extralegal convictions.
What we've got here is a broad, sweeping case of imprisonment without access to counsel or trial. It's a system that funnels wheelbarrows full of public funds into a single church at the expense of poor people's basic freedom. It's thrown together at the behest of one influencial woman whose own words betray some alarmingly unhealthy personal attitudes about her body's own biology, and it's designed to work by virtue of constant, low level mass hysteria.
It's as if Arizona saw Florida being the worst state and said, "We can do better."