Controlling Vice: Regulating Brothel Prostitution in St. Paul, 1865-1883

History of Crime and Criminal Justice

by Joel Best

For eighteen years following the Civil War, the police in St. Paul, Minnesota, informally regulated brothel prostitution. Each month, the madams who ran the brothels were charged with keeping houses of ill fame and fined in the city’s municipal court. In effect, they were paying licensing fees in order to operate illegal enterprises. This arrangement was open; during this period, the city’s newspapers published hundreds of articles about vice and its regulation. Joel Best claims that the sort of informal regulation in St. Paul was common in the late nineteenth century and was far more typical than the better known but brief experiment with legalization tried in St. Louis. With few exceptions, the usual approach to these issues of social control has been to treat informal regulation as a form of corruption, but Best’s view is that St. Paul’s arrangement exposes the assumption that the criminal justice system must seek to eradicate crime. He maintains that other policies are possible. In a book that integrates history and sociology, the author has reconstructed the municipal court records for most of 1865–83, using newspaper articles, an arrest ledger kept by the St. Paul police, and municipal court dockets. He has been able to trace which madams operated brothels and the identities of many of the prostitutes who lived and worked in them.

192 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1998

Reviews

[Ash Hunter · Rating 3 out of 5]

not the best, not the worst. pretty typically organized, with thematic chapters that have a bit of overlap. definitely a sociological history.

[Jenna · Rating 2 out of 5]

The chapter summaries are useful for those who do not have time (or want) to read each chapter very closely. The author has clearly done a lot of archival research and it shows in this book; that is this book's strength. However, the connection between 'regulation' and the actual records is not perhaps quite as clear as could be (as odd as that sounds) and a sort of generalized 'tolerance' for prostitution in St. Paul might somehow be what a reader takes away; perhaps connection could have been made more explicit. The final chapter of analysis (with lessons to be learned) rather took away from what otherwise was a strong historical narrative, in my opinion.
Nonetheless, the city-specific study is worth reading, in that it broadens the landscape; most studies of prostitution have focused on New Orleans (Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women: Illegal Sex in Antebellum New Orleans), Chicago, San Francisco, and New York (i.e. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920), so this focus on Minnesota makes it a worthwhile addition in itself.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

My Professional Ethics professor recommended this book in class. Since I had just recently finished The Happy Hooker, I was intrigued to learn how St. Paul, where I currently live, regulated prostitution in the 1800s.

The book had some very interesting information, from police behavior to dangers of prostitution to the theories behind social deviance. The book gave me a lot of good information for my paper discussing whether or not to legalize prostitution. However, the book disappointed me in a few ways:

1. I thought it would have a lot more detail about the history of regulating brothels. However, it was probably difficult to do without obtaining first hand interviews from the time. The author researched police records to get much of the information used to discuss the history of regulation, but it lacked the in depth descriptions I was anticipating.

2. There was a lot of repetition in the book. It felt as though each chapter was a stand-alone that did not assume the reader had read the information from the previous chapter. It was disappointing that the same information was regurgitated throughout.

Overall, while the topic was intriguing, I wouldn't necessarily go out and recommend the book to interested parties. I could probably verbalize the essence of the book to save an interested reader the trouble.