Don’t snitch, especially on your victims.
Robert J. Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch points to this blog post by Ann Bartow at the Feminist Law Professors blog about the prostitution sting involving former Villanova law school dean Mark Sargent: Women selling sex are arrested and jailed, but the buyers go free?
Prostitution, while a blight on society, is a victimless crime, and therefore not a real crime at all. But if there is a victim, is it primarily the john or the prostitute? Isn’t what we find abhorrent about prostitution the inherent exploitation involved in the exchange, and doesn’t our common sense suggest to us that if anyone is exploited in that exchange it’s the prostitute?
Yet Mark Sargent, whose Catholic colleagues are praying for him and his family “in this difficult time,” buys his freedom by ratting out the woman whom he paid for sex. In a just world, the public would never have known about this incident because it wouldn’t have been any of the cops’ business. But all sympathy for Sargent evaporates with the privileged and unequal treatment Sargent got from the cops, and with his active complicity in the jailing of his fellow perps to save his own hide. I’m very glad that part of the story has been made public. That’s the real disgrace.
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