Decrim, Data, and Rhode Island: A Natural Experiment

Apple Podcasts | Spotify

This week, Kaytlin revisits Rhode Island’s “accidental decrim” of indoor, consensual sex work—and what the data say. During the decrim window, gonorrhea among women fell by ~40% and reported rapes fell by ~30%. We hear from attorney Michael Kiselica, ACLU’s Steven Brown, COYOTE RI’s Bella Robinson, Professor Manisha Shah (UCLA), and Professor Aya Gruber (USC) on how a legal technicality became a natural experiment—and why “end-demand” policies shift risk onto workers instead of reducing it. Plus: the politics that reversed decrim in 2009 and small but real reforms Rhode Island passed more recently. Evidence over panic. Listen and share.

For nearly 30 years, indoor consensual adult sex work was effectively decriminalized in Rhode Island. It wasn’t a secret loophole. It was the result of a 1970s lawsuit, a deliberate statutory change in 1980, and decades of relative quiet — until moral panic, racism, and political ambition brought it all crashing down in 2009.

This episode of The Oldest Profession Podcast tells the story of Rhode Island’s “accidental” decriminalization, what it meant for workers on the ground, and what researchers discovered when they treated it as a natural experiment.

How Rhode Island Decriminalized Indoor Sex Work

Host Kaytlin Bailey starts with the basics: for all the talk about New Zealand and New South Wales, we ran a real-world decriminalization experiment right here in the U.S.

In the mid-1970s, the original COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), founded by sex worker rights pioneer Margo St. James, sued Providence and the state of Rhode Island. The prostitution laws were so vague that “indiscriminate sex” — even without payment — could be a felony. COYOTE challenged both the gender bias (laws enforced almost exclusively against women) and the state’s intrusion into private, consensual sex between adults.

In 1980, that lawsuit settled. The Rhode Island General Assembly rewrote the prostitution statute, and everyone involved understood what they were doing:

• Public soliciting for prostitution remained illegal.
  
• But indoor consensual sex for compensation was no longer a crime.
  

As Steven Brown, executive director of the ACLU of Rhode Island, points out, the idea that this was a “loophole” later discovered by accident is a myth. The attorney general, the legislature, and COYOTE all knew exactly what the settlement meant.

For decades, that’s simply how the law worked. There were still arrests for public solicitation, but what happened behind closed doors was lawful — and it didn’t cause a major political crisis. That wouldn’t come until the early 2000s.

The “Asian Spa” Raids and a Quiet Legal Revolution

Enter Michael Kiselica, a Providence attorney who originally handled car accidents and criminal defense cases. One day, a frantic Korean woman ran into his office asking him to help her friends who had been arrested. He went to the station, got them bailed out, and drove them back to the Victorian house where they worked.

Inside, he found a calm, well-appointed space and a woman in charge who asked him to take the case.

When Michael dug into Rhode Island’s prostitution statute, a single word jumped out: “public.” The law required that the offense occur in a public place. The house he had just visited — buzzed entry, locked interior door, private rooms — was anything but public.

He began refusing plea deals and pushing the “public” element as a defense. While other attorneys quietly pled their clients, Michael insisted on not-guilty pleas, citing the risk of deportation for non-citizen clients if they were convicted of prostitution-related offenses.

Prosecutors started dismissing his cases rather than risk a ruling. Eventually, pressure came down from above: stop dismissing Kiselica’s cases and take one to trial.

The “trial” that followed wasn’t dramatic. Michael and the prosecutor stipulated to the police reports as the full record and asked Judge Elaine Bucci to decide as a matter of law. Bucci carefully analyzed the facts:

• An exterior glass door with a lock and buzzer
  
• A lobby
  
• A second solid, locked door
  
• A private room with a closed door where one worker and one client were alone
  

No one could see or hear what was happening. Whatever it was, it wasn’t happening “in public.”

Bucci dismissed the prostitution charge and rejected the fallback “unlicensed massage” charge, noting that nothing about the encounter resembled a therapeutic, health-oriented massage governed by the Department of Health.

Her decision confirmed in practice what the 1980 settlement had already established in law: indoor consensual adult prostitution in Rhode Island was not a crime.

It didn’t make front-page news overnight. But as raids on “Asian spas” continued and prosecutors ran into the same legal wall, frustration in law enforcement, city hall, and the press began to build.

Raids, “Rescue,” and the Xenophobic Backlash

By the early 2000s, there was increasing migration from Southeast Asia — Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos — following the Vietnam War, and a noticeable presence of Asian-owned massage businesses in Rhode Island. The sight of Korean and Southeast Asian women working in these spaces became the focal point of a racialized panic.

Police framed raids as “rescue operations” against “sex slaves.” But as Michael explains, what he actually saw were grateful clients who never once asked him to “get me out of this.” Even in private, one-on-one conversations with a lawyer, no one told him they were being held against their will.

Still, the public story hardened: these women were victims who could only be helped by arresting them.

As Steven Brown notes, police openly argued that they needed to criminalize indoor prostitution so they could:

• Arrest women and check their immigration status
  
• “Ensure” they had proper health care
  
• Investigate whether they were being trafficked
  

In practice, that meant: arrests, jail time, immigration referrals, and pressure to give up “pimps” — all under the banner of protection.

Moral Panic and the 2009 Recriminalization

Once the “Asian spa” story hit the press in 2003, politicians and activists lined up to demand that Rhode Island “close the loophole.” The coalition pushing recriminalization included:

• Neo-abolitionist feminists, particularly academic Donna Hughes, who publicly framed all sex work as “modern-day slavery” and used racially loaded language (“mama-sans,” etc.) to describe Asian women running brothels.
  
• Religious conservatives opposed to sex outside marriage and pornography.
  
• NIMBY residents upset about a visible “red light district” and the presence of Asian sex work establishments in their neighborhoods.
  

On the other side stood a broad progressive coalition: the ACLU, civil rights organizations, and even mainstream NOW chapters that defended decriminalization and warned about the harms of rolling it back.

It took five years of pressure before the General Assembly finally gave in. In 2009, Rhode Island:

• Re-criminalized indoor prostitution, ending nearly three decades of de facto decriminalization.
  
• Added mandatory HIV testing for anyone convicted of a prostitution offense.
  
• Imposed extra fines that applied only to prostitution-related convictions.
  

These weren’t just a return to the old status quo; they were new punishments aimed specifically at sex workers.

A Natural Experiment: What the Data Show

For researcher Dr. Manisha Shah, an economist at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Rhode Island’s history was a once-in-a-career research opportunity.

With co-author Scott Cunningham, she treated Rhode Island as the “treatment” state and the rest of the U.S. (or New England) as the control. Because Rhode Island’s decriminalization was policy-driven and relatively abrupt, it looked very much like a clean “shock” for causal analysis.

Two major questions guided their work:

1. STIs: Does decriminalization change rates of sexually transmitted infections, particularly gonorrhea among women?
   
2. Violence: Does decriminalization affect violence against women, especially reported rapes?
   

Using CDC gonorrhea data and FBI Uniform Crime Reports over time, they found:

• A roughly 40% decrease in gonorrhea among women in Rhode Island during the decriminalization period.
  
• A roughly 30% decrease in reported rapes during the same period.

These were not small changes. They were statistically significant, large-magnitude reductions — and they lined up with similar findings from other contexts, like legal “tippelzones” in the Netherlands and studies from New York City showing reduced violence in areas where sex work establishments opened.

Why? Decriminalization changes behavior:

• Sex workers can refuse unsafe clients and insist on condom use without the constant threat of arrest.
  
• Workers can collaborate with each other and with police, warning about dangerous clients and calling for help when something goes wrong.
  
• Clients know that they can’t assume impunity; abusive behavior is more likely to have consequences.
  

In short, decriminalization doesn’t just leave the market unchanged — it shifts power toward sex workers and away from the most dangerous clients.

The Nordic Model vs. Decrim

Dr. Shah also contrasts Rhode Island’s results with research on the “end demand” / Nordic model, which criminalizes buyers but not sellers. Studies from Sweden and the UK show:

• Demand doesn’t disappear; instead, the type of buyer changes. Those who remain are more willing to take risks and less concerned about law or consent.
  
• Swedish men increasingly travel abroad (e.g., to Thailand) to buy sex, exporting demand.
  
• Reported violence against women, including rape, can increase after end demand laws are introduced.
  

In other words, the Nordic model doesn’t reduce demand — it displaces and concentrates it in more dangerous forms, with worse outcomes for sex workers and women overall.

By contrast, Rhode Island’s decriminalization period is one of the clearest examples we have of harm shrinking when sex work is decriminalized.

Freedom, Recriminalization, and COYOTE Rhode Island

For Bella Robinson, the legal landscape wasn’t an abstraction. Before moving to Rhode Island, she was living in New Jersey. After she and a friend posted a Craigslist ad in their 40s, a SWAT team kicked in her door with a battering ram and guns drawn. She spent 90 days in jail and left with a crushing fine she couldn’t afford, under constant threat of a warrant.

When a client mentioned that “sex work is legal in Rhode Island,” she didn’t believe him — until she Googled it.

Then she packed up and moved.

Arriving in March 2009, she describes Rhode Island under decrim as “freedom. Total freedom.” She remembers little violence and no one trying to threaten her for working.

That freedom didn’t last. When the legislature re-criminalized indoor prostitution in November 2009, Bella was furious — and that anger pushed her into full-time activism. She founded COYOTE Rhode Island that same year, building on the legacy of the original COYOTE but focused on the local fallout of recriminalization.

Since then, she’s:

• Documented cases where criminalization punishes vulnerable youth — like three 18-year-old girls charged with felony sex trafficking for acts orchestrated by adults supervising group homes.
  
• Helped rape survivors who refuse to call police because they fear arrest, outing, or further harm.
  
• Connected criminalization to broader economic precarity: rising rents, increased homelessness, and the way poverty makes exploitation easier.
  

Bella and COYOTE RI do low-barrier outreach (“we open the car, anyone who comes up gets supplies”) and have built a check-in culture: a support group where people take turns facilitating, receive modest compensation, and are expected to respond to daily check-ins so the community knows when someone is missing, isolated, or in trouble.

Alongside that ground work, Bella has served on committees, educated legislators, and co-led community-based research that helped push the debate forward.

Partial Wins, Continuing Struggle

The story doesn’t end in 2009.

Steven Brown notes that a few years ago, the Rhode Island legislature created a commission to reexamine prostitution laws. Its report cited research like Shah’s and recommended changes. In response, the General Assembly recently:

• Repealed the extra fine that applied only to prostitution convictions.
  
• Repealed mandatory HIV testing for prostitution offenses.
  
• Passed a limited immunity law so sex workers who report certain crimes to police can’t be charged with prostitution for coming forward.
  

These are small but meaningful steps. They remove some of the worst, most stigmatizing elements of the 2009 crackdown and recognize, at least in part, that punishing sex workers makes everyone less safe.

But full decriminalization has not yet been restored. The evidence is there. The lived experience is there. The question, as always, is whether policymakers will choose evidence over moral panic.

Evidence, Courage, and What Comes Next

As Kaytlin concludes, any researcher who approaches this topic honestly knows what the data show: decriminalizing sex work is the only policy that consistently reduces violence and STIs and respects the human rights and dignity of people in the sex industry.

But being right isn’t enough. It takes:

• Judges willing to make unpopular, legally sound decisions like Judge Bucci.
  
• Lawyers like Michael who refuse to plead clients into deportable offenses.
  
• Organizers like Bella who turn anger into infrastructure and community care.
  
• Advocates like Steven, Manisha, and Aya who keep bringing evidence to a debate dominated by moralism and fear.
  

Rhode Island’s “accidental” decriminalization wasn’t a loophole. It was a real-world test — one that showed exactly what happens when we stop arresting people for buying and selling sex.

The results were clear: less disease, less violence, more safety, and more space for sex workers to protect themselves and each other.

🎧 Listen to “Rhode Island’s Accidental Decriminalization of Sex Work” on The Oldest Profession Podcast and sign up for the Old Pros newsletter at oldprosonline.org for weekly sex worker rights news from around the world.