Controlling vice
Subtitle: regulating brothel prostitution in St. Paul, 1865-1883
By: Joel Best.
Series: The history of crime and criminal justice series
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Columbus
Language: eng
Number of pages: 175
Subjects: Prostitution -- Minnesota -- Saint Paul -- History -- 19th century.; Sex-oriented businesses -- Law and legislation -- Minnesota -- Saint Paul -- History -- 19th century.; Prostitutes -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- Minnesota -- History -- 19th century.
Description: For eighteen years following the Civil War, the police in St. Paul, Minnesota, informally regulated brothel prostitution. Each month, the madams who ran the brothels were charged with keeping houses of ill fame and fined in the city's municipal court. In effect, they were paying licensing fees in order to operate illegal enterprises. This arrangement was open; during this period, the city's newspapers published hundreds of articles about vice and its regulation.

Joel Best claims that the sort of informal regulation in St. Paul was common in the late nineteenth century and was far more typical than the better known but brief experiment with legalization tried in St. Louis. With few exceptions, the usual approach to these issues of social control has been to treat informal regulation as a form of corruption, but Best's view is that St. Paul's arrangement exposes the assumption that the criminal justice system must seek to eradicate crime.

He maintains that other policies are possible.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-169) and index.