To answer the question of whether prostitution should be legalized, all one need do is ask the question of why it is illegal in the first place.
So, why is prostitution illegal? Because it’s gross? Stupid? Because it might contribute to an increase in STD’s? Hardly, the reason it’s illegal is because the men who were making the rules at the time it was outlawed were pressured into it by their wives and or girlfriends. That’s why it’s illegal.
So, now we continue to have money taken out of our paychecks to help pay for this “crime.” We pay for vice-squads, and for jail space to hold those caught doing the nasty illegally, with money that could have been better spent on schools or helping those who lead such lives of desperation that they turn to selling their bodies on the streets.
Perhaps it might be better to look at it from the other side; what are some good reasons for keeping up with the status-quo, i.e. for continuing to have prostitution be a crime. So, what are these reasons then? Because it’s icky? Immoral? Because we’re afraid our husbands and/or boyfriends will stop at the local cat house on the way home from work if we’re not in the mood every time he asks? If these are the reasons, it would seem we’re still in the business of trying to legislate morality, and that can’t be a good thing, because who in the end should be allowed to decide what is moral and what isn’t?
Cleary the time for legalizing prostitution has come, if only because it’s soaking up state money that could be put to better use; or maybe because if you look at it just right, you might come to see that making laws to force people conform to what others believe is right, or moral, actually sort of goes against the spirit of our the Constitution, and that the very idea of trying to do so might be a perversion of the very idea of morality.
The real reason that prostitution is still illegal is because those who make the laws have no pressing reason to change it. Politicians know better than to change laws that nobody is making a lot of noise about, or to take on an issue that might lose them some votes in the next election. This is why prostitution will remain illegal until someone with enough money, meaning clout, gets busted and the whole things winds up in the Supreme Court, or until some state needs money so desperately that those in charge will be willing to get kicked out of office for even suggesting that such a filthy thing as prostitution be legalized for no better reason than because it might generate revenue for the state through taxation.