Informant38

this case would have never seen the light of day:

JUHU THUKRAL:Sometimes the customer is a police officer himself. And they are terrified of going forward. When we are able to go forward, we often find that the police don’t do anything. So the reason that we oppose these kinds of enhancing penalties against customers is that in the long run it just drives people further underground. And there have been studies that have shown that this doesn’t work very well.

AMY GOODMAN: Though you’re in the minority of the women’s rights groups on that, because they were pushing for—

JUHU THUKRAL: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —instead of the woman being the one who’s constantly rounded up, picked up, arrested and thrown out, the sex worker, that the johns would be focused on, the people like, well, presumably Eliot Spitzer.

JUHU THUKRAL: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And he may now be subject to his own law that he pushed through.

JUHU THUKRAL: There were a number of women’s rights groups who agreed with Eliot Spitzer, obviously, but there were also a lot of groups that didn’t agree with that position, because, again, you know, it sounds like it’s a good answer—let’s go ahead and arrest everybody, and that’s going to end prostitution—but the truth is, people go into prostitution most often because they’re really desperate for money or they are looking around, they’re not able to make enough money. A lot of our clients have jobs in the mainstream and then supplement it with sex work, because they don’t have enough to live on.

The inner circle of the people around Rudy Giuliani hate Eliot Spitzer, and Michael Mukasey is part of that inner circle.
-
DNow! 12.Mar.08