Should New Hampshire Legalize Prostitution?

Recently, the Portsmouth (New Hampshire) Daily Herald has been full of stories about local prostitution cases, a brothel across the river in nearby Maine, local seacoast cases. The issue of legalizing prostitution has arisen. 
The case against legalization has been based in no small part on the notion that every woman who has entered into pay for sex has been exploited, forced into a very bad position and is only engaging in this activity because she has run out of all other viable options.

In this country, prostitution is legal only in Nevada, and it makes headlines to titillate the masses in all others. 

Prostitution is legal in Amsterdam, and apparently the Netherlands have not collapsed.

Some years ago, the Phantom took a wrong turn trying to find a hotel in downtown Washington, D.C. and drove down a part of 7th Street and beheld a sidewalk full of women wearing only bras, panties, garters and stockings, pacing up and down the sidewalk, approaching automobiles. Some of these females looked to be no more than fifteen. 

The Phantom has also met a woman who worked in a hospital, who "turned tricks" for a second income. 

When asked whether she turned tricks for the young doctors, she replied, "Oh, no, the young doctor is an investment. You give free samples to get him hooked for the long term investment; any way that's the way the nurses play it. Then they've got a long term return, bank account, retirement plan and a very good severance package, when things go sour."

From these disparate experiences, the Phantom has concluded there is a very broad spectrum of sex for money and that spectrum may run from the streetwalker, to the call girl to the legally married gold digger, to the proper Jane Austen heroine.

To a greater or lesser extent, they are all in it for the money, my hospital worker friend would say.

But for those who would self identify as "sex workers," who go to work every day to get paid for sex, would it not make some sense to, as Beadie Russell said in The Wire, acknowledge the truth, "What those women need is a union" and be done with it?

How would we "legalize" the trade? Would we permit street walkers? Would we insist all prostitutes work in brothels? Would we legalize call girl "escort" services. Would we outlaw pimps? Would we forbid prostitutes to use drugs? How would we enforce that? How would we handle alcoholic prostitutes?  How would prostitutes be paid? For piece work? On salary? Would seniority increase pay? Or would it decrease pay? Would prostitutes get vacation? Would they be allowed to work on vacation? Would they have retirement pension plans? 

If we brought prostitution above ground, there would doubtless be public health benefits--regular exams for HIV, licenses requiring testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, more consistent use of condoms, not to mention the possibility of taxing the trade. What prostitute enslaved by an abusive pimp would not prefer the government playing the role of protector?

This may be one of those areas which "deserves more study." We'd have to know more about what "sex workers" themselves want, think possible and would be willing to accept. We'd have to understand the full spectrum of the practice. 

But first, we'd have to be willing to look some uncomfortable truths in the face and have the courage to confront them.