School for ‘Johns’ a Reality Check on Prostitution

Lesson No. 1 at the school for johns--the life of a “Pretty Woman” is pretty ugly.

Lesson No. 2: You can do time for trying to have a good time.

These are the hard lessons of a one-day crash course that allows johns--men arrested for patronizing prostitutes--to avoid jail, in much the same way that a traffic school eases punishments for errant drivers.

And Lt. John Dutto, the police officer who runs the program, says it works. Of 800 men who have gone through the school since it started in 1995, only three have been arrested again on the same charges.

The men also pay a $500 fine, but the emphasis is on fear.

“We scare the hell out of them,” he said.

Among other things, the johns are given a graphic picture of life in jail. “Telling them there’s only one toilet in a crowded cell, right in the open, is enough for some of them,” Dutto said.

The johns also learn about such hazards as getting beaten and robbed by a pimp. And there are movies about diseases that can be contracted from frequenting streetwalkers.

The real epiphany, however, may come when the johns confront the realities of a prostitute’s life.

For that, Dutto gets a lot of help from Norma Hotaling, a former hooker who went on to become an honors graduate at San Francisco State University. Both Hotaling and Dutto are amazed at how little some men know of the devastation and dangers of prostitution.

“Many don’t realize this is trafficking in women,” Hotaling said.

She said the average prostitute is 16 when she starts in the business. She tells the men about the ties among prostitution, drugs and child sexual abuse. Studies show that more than 80% of the street prostitutes in San Francisco have been beaten on the job and almost 70% have been raped, she said.

Former prostitutes address the class and recount lives ruined by drugs and possessive pimps.

“I will never be able to think of engaging the services of a prostitute without being stopped by the memory of hearing the pain in the voices of the women who spoke,” one graduate wrote on a survey given to those who took the course.

The class, officially known as the First Offenders Prostitution Program and believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, is open to prostitutes as well as their customers. But hardly any take it.

“Time is money to them,” said Dutto. “They can get out of jail with a phone call.”

The program is not without critics. Margo St. James, who founded a “sex workers” organization called COYOTE (Call Off Your Old, Tired Ethics), said the school is taking a “very negative tack by trying to shame men.”

“It’s a waste of time and money,” said St. James.

Her group is trying to repeal laws against prostitution, and a city task force recommended in December that San Francisco become the nation’s first major city to decriminalize it. Mayor Willie Brown quickly voiced reservations, fearing that it would make San Francisco a center for prostitution.

St. James maintained the city has a tradition of tolerance toward prostitution that dates back to the Gold Rush. She’d like to see famous prostitutes remembered in a “Painted Ladies” mural.

The names include Polly Adler, Tessie Wall and Sally Stanford, who eventually became mayor of Sausalito. History has almost forgotten the colorful Wall, who opened the annual Policemen’s Ball on the arm of James “Sunny Jim” Rolph, mayor from 1911 to 1930.

But the perspective presented by the school for johns is far less romantic and more ominous. Other cities are impressed.

Buffalo, N.Y., duplicated the program, and Aurora, Colo., is considering it. Toronto Councillor Judy Sgro visited in 1995 and was impressed.

“It is a great program that is being very well received in Toronto and is a model that is being started in several other cities in Canada,” she wrote Brown last July.

Why the interest in Canada?

“The courts here just give people a slap on the wrist,” she said in a telephone interview.