Prostitution may be the world's oldest profession, and laws prohibiting prostitution may well be the oldest example of government regulation and government sex discrimination. In a free society, however, all such laws are inappropriate because they violate the basic rights and liberties of the individuals involved. Recent research indicates that “over one million women in the United States earn their living by full-time prostitution. Furthermore, roughly one in every six American men has been a willing client of a prostitute within the past five years (cite1).” This shows that many people, buyers and sellers, are a part of the prostitution profession, so for the United States government to ban prostitution for only a moral reason, and spend millions of tax payers’ dollars on trying to fight a never ending battle with prostitution seems ludicrous. In a free society in which we live in, it makes no sense for the government to be telling people that they cannot charge a fee for harmless services they otherwise are at liberty to give away. This is why Prostitution should be legal.
Instead of spending billions on illegalizing prostitution, “the city of Los Angeles alone spends close to 100 million dollars annually dealing with illegal prostitution (cite4)”; the United States government should legalize prostitution. For more reasons than one, prostitution thrives in areas that have a very high crime rate, because of this, police officers and courtrooms are overburdened with these cases, having little or no impact on prostitution. The prostitutes and their customers pay their fines and are back to the streets in no time in a revolving door process. Since the local law enforcement is constantly busy, adding prostitution to the list of things to protect us from, the real crimes go unchecked and unchallenged; enabling a better chance of crime success for criminals. However if prostitution were legal, police personnel would have less work trying to eliminate prostitution and more time protecting the populace from real crimes such as, murder, rape, and robbery. "It is estimated that if prostitution were legalized in the United States, the rape rate would decrease by roughly 25% for a decrease of approximately 25,000 rapes per year. The analysis seems to support the hypothesis that the rape rate could be lowered if prostitution was more readily available. This would be accomplished in most countries by its legalization (cite4)."
If prostitution should become legal, it must be regulated for the safety of the prostitute and client. Since prostitution is illegal it has been forced into the streets, this greatly increases danger for prostitutes. Prostitutes whose jobs involve working at night and getting into cars with strangers can be, and often have been, easy pickings for serial killers and other sociopaths. James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University, says “prostitutes are the most frequent targets for serial killers (cite3).” A sensible solution to these problems would be to follow the example of some European cities, where prostitution is allowed in certain designated areas, such as brothels and red-light districts. People who are interested in the activity go to places where it's permitted, and they leave alone the neighborhoods that don't wish to be associated with it. Therefore, the prostitutes can work in safer environments. According to current evidence, “roughly half of the street prostitutes in Washington, D.C., and New York City are HIV-positive. In Newark, New Jersey, the estimate is that close to 60% of all prostitutes carry the AIDS virus. Yet, in the relatively "free market" of Nevada, where prostitution is legal, not one (as of 1989) of the state-licensed prostitutes has ever tested positive for AIDS (cite3).” Because Nevada’s brothels are regulated, the prostitutes are required to give monthly blood tests, but such precautions would likely occur in the absence of state regulation. The reason