By chance I moved to Rhode Island that same year. I had depended on sex work for my livelihood for decades, enduring arrests, one three-year and one five-year sentence at a state prison, and the violence of the criminal justice system. I regularly suffered from coercion at the hands of the state. My first prostitution charge and conviction resulted from refusing to go out with a police officer. Later on I did time at the Lowell Correctional Facility, where guards physically and sexually abused female inmates, using their positions of power and authority to pressure women into having sex.
After I was released, I had little choice but to use sex work to pay the exorbitant fines the judge had levied or I risked going back to jail. The criminal justice system, in my experience, was just another oppressive force that endangered my rights, my health, and my agency. Moving to Rhode Island was supposed to change that. For a little while it did. Crossing the state border put me in a world where I was an equal citizen before the law and where the state protected me from violence rather than caused it. In Rhode Island I experienced freedom for the first time.
That feeling of liberty was short-lived. Governor Donald Carcieri signed the recriminalization bill into law on 3 November 2009, destroying with his pen the world of equality and agency that I had briefly inhabited. I had tasted the freedom of sex work under decriminalization for six months. I had caught a glimpse of the life I deserved. Having those rights again taken away from me galvanized me to found the Rhode Island chapter of Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE RI) and advocate for decriminalization.
