The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island today filed a “friend of the court” brief in the R.I. Supreme Court, arguing that the Providence Board of Licenses’ revocation of the Foxy Lady’s entertainment license earlier this month, and the failure to issue a stay of the decision pending full judicial review, violate the club’s First Amendment rights. All of the club’s licenses to operate were revoked earlier this month by the Board after undercover officers arrested three female employees for allegedly soliciting for prostitution.
 
Last week, the state Department of Business Regulation overturned the Board’s revocation of the club’s liquor license, but the only avenue of appeal regarding its entertainment license is through a discretionary petition to the R.I. Supreme Court. This, the ACLU’s court brief says, “turns the First Amendment on its head . . . [E]stablishments like the Foxy Lady that require entertainment licenses to engage in protected First Amendment activities face more severe punishment for the same conduct . . . than businesses that do not engage in protected speech.”
 
Noting that exotic dancing has long been held to be a form of expression protected by the First Amendment, the brief also argues that “courts must be especially vigilant to protect exotic dancing and other types of unpopular speech precisely because they face the greatest threats of suppression.”
 
In calling for the Court to “immediately grant a stay of the order revoking” the club’s license, the brief argues that the First Amendment requires a stay in order to prevent  “an unconstitutional deprivation of Petitioner’s free speech pending judicial review.” The brief goes on to argue that the Board’s decision “manifestly conflicts with the requirement that ordinances that require licenses to engage in protected speech must provide administrative bodies narrow, objective, and definite standards …  and must not provide unbridled discretion.” The brief explains:
 
“The ordinance governing the Board’s revocation decision grants it authority to revoke a license ‘for any reason which the board may deem to be in the public interest.’ … That standard exemplifies the ‘unbridled discretion’ that the Supreme Court has repeatedly found to be inconsistent with the requirements of the First Amendment. The Board’s history of providing less severe sanctions for more serious crimes at other licensed establishments, including felony acts of violence, illustrates the unconstitutionally broad power to arbitrarily restrict protected speech.”
 
            The brief adds:
           
“For every day that the revocation order remains in place without a stay, Petitioner has been deprived of its ability to engage in constitutionally protected speech without any judicial review. The First Amendment does not allow this result.”
 
A hearing on the club’s petition is scheduled to be heard by the Court on Thursday.
 
ACLU volunteer attorney Jared Goldstein said today:
"It's clear under the First Amendment that the Foxy Lady has a right to present adult entertainment, and that right can't be taken away arbitrarily, but the Board has claimed essentially unlimited power to suppress protected First Amendment activities for any reason it sees fit. The Constitution does not allow protected rights to be taken away on the whim of administrative officials." 
 
ACLU of RI executive director Steven Brown added: “Imagine a symphony orchestra barred by the state from performing again because a musician was found to have sold marijuana to a colleague backstage. Imagine a bookstore being shuttered by the government because peace activists planned acts of civil disobedience in a backroom. Imagine a movie theater permanently closed because an employee assaulted a patron. What the City has actually done to the Foxy Lady is no different. It is a serious attack on First Amendment rights, and we hope the Court will correct this injustice.”
 
The ACLU’s brief can be found here:
http://riaclu.org/images/uploads/181231_brief_FoxyLady.pdf

Joined by a number of local and national organizations, the sex worker advocacy group COYOTE-RI today blasted Providence city officials for their arrest last week of three sex workers on charges of soliciting for prostitution at the Foxy Lady adult entertainment establishment. In a statement issued today, the groups called for the charges against the women to be dropped and an end to “the ongoing harassment of sex workers.”
 
COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) Rhode Island is a group of sex workers, former sex workers, trafficking victims and allies that advocates for policies that promote the health and safety of people involved in the sex industry. The group’s statement today calls last week’s police raid “a grotesque misuse of taxpayer dollars to oppress adult women whose only alleged crime is selling services to consenting adults in a private location.” Local groups joining in the statement included RICARES, TGI Network of Rhode Island, and the ACLU of Rhode Island.
 
The Providence Licensing Board is today considering revoking the Foxy Lady’s license based solely on these arrests, which is a harsher punishment, the establishment’s lawyers have pointed out, than that meted out to nightclubs where shootings have taken place.
 
COYOTE-RI’s statement, which has also been signed online by hundreds of individuals, adds:
 
“Criminalization of sex work has done absolutely nothing to curtail ‘the oldest profession.’ Instead, it has led to increased rates of violence and stigma against sex workers, and even adverse health outcomes. A recent study showed that that repressive policing was associated with having three times the odds of experiencing sexual and physical violence from clients or other parties. That is why such diverse and respected groups as the World Health Organization, United Nations AIDS, and Amnesty International all recommend decriminalization of sex work to reduce violence against, and incidence of HIV among, sex workers.”
 
The statement concludes by saying that “moralistic raids on sex workers trying to provide for themselves will not ‘save’ them, but rather will contribute to long-term harm and their continued marginalization. Arrests like these don’t stop crime, but instead only create more victims. We urge City officials to drop the charges against these women and end the ongoing harassment of sex workers.”
 
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Despite legislation enacted in 2017 aimed at promoting criminal justice reform, the Rhode Island General Assembly’s 2018 session took significant steps back from a “smart justice” approach by adding more than a dozen new felonies to the books and increasing sentences for several other crimes.
 
This expansion of the “Statehouse-to-prison pipeline” was the disappointing finding of an ACLU report issued today, updating an extensive analysis of RI lawmaking on criminal justice that the organization issued in January.  That earlier report examined the problems of mass incarceration and overcriminalization that result from the state’s routine passage of laws that create new crimes and add sentences to existing crimes – in the absence of any analysis to support the expansions. Between 2000 and 2017, that earlier report found, the General Assembly created more than 170 new crimes.
 
The new report found a return to those ways, with legislative action in 2018 adding to “the ongoing upward trend of creating new crimes, adding harsher sentences, and sending more and more people to prison while doing nothing to stem that tide.” The updated report, “Justice De-Investment: The Regrettable Expansion of the Statehouse-to-Prison Pipeline in 2018,” highlighted several especially problematic examples of this year’s lawmaking on crimes.
 
The report was particularly critical of what it called a “major step backwards” in criminal justice reform, with the enactment of two laws imposing mandatory minimum sentences on certain second offenders. As is widely noted in criminal justice research, mandatory minimums undermine judicial discretion and give prosecutors greater power to coerce plea deals out of defendants who may be innocent. It had been many years since the General Assembly last enacted bills imposing such sentences.
 
The report also documented a continuation of other deleterious trends that had been cited in the January study, such as arbitrariness in both the length of prison sentences and the financial penalties imposed, and the creation of crimes for conduct already addressed by existing criminal laws.
 
In reviewing the many criminal laws enacted this session, the report expressed dismay that the lack of a “smart justice” approach to crime came on the heels of the General Assembly’s passage in 2017 of legislation aimed at reforming RI’s criminal justice system. The report concludes with a plea to RI lawmakers to make good in 2019 on the promises of “justice reinvestment,” rather than continue with an ineffective, expensive, and counter-productive approach to criminal justice.
 
The ACLU’s latest report can be found here.
 
More information on the ACLU of RI’s earlier report, from January 2018, can be found here.

Listen To Our Coalition Interview With S Brown RI ACLU Executive Director!​

Kim Ruff and John Phillips, Jr., candidates seeking the Libertarian Party’s nomination for President and Vice-President in 2020, are of the mindset that sex work is work and 100% committed to ensure that it should be treated thusly.

A central tenet of Libertarianism is self-ownership. It is the belief that you – and no one else without your explicit consent – can own you. As such, your life, liberty, and property – paramount of which is your body – belongs to you and you can do with those things howsoever you see fit. No one has the right to force you to do otherwise.

The ‘world’s oldest profession’, prostitution - and the wider umbrella of sex work -  are the most direct examples of individuals exercising their right to use their body in whatever manner they see fit and doing so in a mutually-beneficial, entirely consensual, and financially-profitable way.

Governmental policies, rules, and regulations that were enacted under the auspices of either protecting sex workers from themselves or society from them have done nothing to help either and have instead – like the Drug War and Prohibition before it have shown – fostered a black market that puts sex workers at greater risk of harm, abuse, and death.

It is time we recognize that sex work is work and return to this long beleaguered group of individuals the rights we never should have taken from them in the first place. 

Find The Ruff/Phillips Campaign @ ​https://www.facebook.com/RuffPhillips/

Eight state-based and national advocacy organizations – including the ACLU of RI, the NAACP Providence Branch, the National Employment Law Center, and JustLeadershipUSA – have sharply criticized the Rhode Island Department of Health (DOH) for a “disturbing trend” of “undermining a major goal of criminal justice reform by increasing the barriers for people with past criminal records or substance use disorders to obtain professional licensing.” The five-page letter to DOH Director Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott highlights several recent Department rule enactments or re-adoptions that the groups say unfairly allow for the disqualification of people with any criminal record from obtaining professional licenses in a number of fields – ranging from EMTs to midwives to physical therapy assistants.
 
Among the recent actions highlighted in the letter is an August 2018 rule to require that people applying for physical therapist or physical therapy assistant licenses undergo a full criminal background investigation, without providing any guidance on how entries on that record should be evaluated. The letter states that “a twenty-year-old drug conviction could have an adverse licensing impact on someone who has worked for years, successfully, to stabilize their life” given that there is no time limit on how far back a criminal record can be considered. Moreover, the regulations also allow arrests that did not result in conviction to be grounds for licensure exclusion, a practice that the groups say will have a significant racially discriminatory impact.
 
The letter cites other recently filed DOH regulations that, despite objections from groups, similarly maintain or expand the use of criminal record checks to potentially deny licensing opportunities. For example, applicants for midwife licenses will now also be subject to criminal record checks with no standards to decide disqualification, and they will continue to be subject to discipline for undefined “immoral conduct.” Massage therapists can be denied a license on the basis of any criminal record, as can EMTs for a “violation of any federal or state law,” including civil matters.
 
The letter to Alexander-Scott notes that in each instance, the DOH summarily rejected the groups’ concerns about the scope and impact of the background check standards, instead replying with minor variants of a one-sentence explanation that the restrictions were for “the safety of patients and the integrity of public health.” Objecting to DOH’s “relentless efforts to make it difficult for formerly incarcerated or convicted people and individuals with substance use disorders to obtain professional licenses,” the groups said the agency “has demonstrated a callous disregard for the notion of rehabilitation that underlies Rhode Island’s purported commitment to criminal justice reform.”
 
The letter further notes that there are “more than 70,000 Rhode Islanders [who] have a past felony record. This is to say nothing of people with misdemeanor records or with felony arrests not followed by convictions.” In addition to pointing to the large number of people potentially affected by the regulations, the letter emphasized that discrimination against people with criminal records “is also an issue of equity that should be of the utmost importance to RIDOH. As in other states, justice-involved Rhode Islanders are disproportionately low-income people of color, whose access to meaningful employment is hindered not only by base hiring discrimination but by barriers to licensing.”
 
The letter concludes by asking the Department “to stop making it more, rather than less, difficult for people who have been involved in the criminal justice system to enter professions that will help them turn their lives around” and to instead “reverse course and collaborate with our organizations over the next year” to promote occupational licensing processes that give a fair chance to all Rhode Islanders.
 
Employment in licensed fields is a crucial component of successful reentry for many people who are trying to exit the criminal legal system at the conclusion of their sentence. These jobs could help people steer clear of future involvement with the criminal legal system while enabling them to contribute to the local economy and state tax base.
 
The Department’s actions stand in contrast to a national movement that seeks to eliminate barriers to employment that formerly incarcerated people are forced to confront. In the past year alone, ten states have enacted provisions designed to reduce these barriers.
 
“Occupational licensing leads to career ladders that create economic mobility, access to better medical benefits and health care and other opportunities to live a better life,” said Roberta Meyers, Director of the National H.I.R.E. Network. ‘The Department of Health’s recent actions to create vague criminal record barriers to occupational licensing conflict with its mission to protect and promote the health and safety of Rhode Island residents and are contrary to our nation’s promise of offering second chances.”
 
“Whether or not this is what they intend to do, the Department of Health is enabling and entrenching the systemic, racialized harm that has come to define the state’s criminal legal system,” added Megan French-Marcelin, Fair Hiring Project Coordinator at JustLeadershipUSA. “Each of the Department’s decisions to authorize the exclusion of people with criminal records is a slap in the face not just to them and their families, but also to the advocates and other policymakers who’ve committed to making Rhode Island a leader in criminal justice reform.”
 
ACLU of RI executive director Steven Brown said: “This Administration has commendably committed the state to promoting justice reinvestment. But that means little if people find that their past history with the criminal justice system keeps them locked out of a broad array of state-licensed occupations. It is critical for agencies like the Department of Health to revise, not perpetuate, these counter-productive practices.”
 
A copy of the organizations’ letter can be found here.