Free Getting Screwed by Alison Bass Page B

end, Jillian does no prison time and completes her year of probation without further incident. But she has become hooked on methadone, which she considers “100 times more addictive than heroin.” In an interview a few years later, she says she is still trying to wean herself off methadone but finding it incredibly difficult. In the meantime, theauthorities have a “sword of Damocles” over her head. “If I don’t follow every bureaucratic rule in the program, they cut off my supply and I’m in horrible torture for months,” she says. “Forced treatment is nothing better than mind control.”
    Julie Moya has her own sword of Damocles to deal with upon her release from prison in 2007. She is still on probation and completely broke. “I didn’t know how I was going to face the world again,” she recalls. “I had an arrest record and no high school education. What could I possibly do?”
    In prison, at least, there had been some structure to her days. After a few months in Bedford Hills, a maximum-security prison for women in Westchester County, Julie was transferred to Beacon, a minimum-security facility in upstate New York, which was essentially a working cattle farm. The farmer in charge saw that Julie had a way with animals, so he put her in charge of the cow pod. “I made friends with everyone there,” she says. “I was working with the calves. They would send the baby calves in with their umbilical cords hanging off, and I would take care of them until they were six months old. I took care of one little blind calf for a long time.”
    At Beacon, Moya worked from 8:00 in the morning until 8:00 in the evening and was exhausted by the end of the day. Even so, she loved it. “The work farm was like being in paradise,” she says. “You could see the rivers and beautiful mountains in the distance.”
    Her release from prison was a rude awakening. She felt angry and adrift in a city in which she had once felt embraced. It took her a long time to regain her footing. Several co-workers whom she had bailed out when they were all arrested in 2005 repaid their loans. Other friends came around and told her that she had to open up her place again. “They missed the place,” she says and then laughs. “Half of the guys at NBC had our website on their computers. It really was the best little whorehouse in New York.”
    But deep inside, Julie was hurt and angry — at the lies that law enforcement had spread about her and the people who had turned on her to save their own skins. She decided to write a blog about her experiences —to get the truth out there, she says — and also to make the case for legalizing prostitution in the United States. “I used to not want legalization; I thought it would lower prices and allow the government to get their hands on it,” she says over lunch one day at an Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan. “But now I do. I think it would make things safer for the girls and clients too.”
    Many sex workers are afraid their families will find out what they do, she says. If sex work were legal in the United States, they wouldn’t fear being arrested and having their families find out and ostracize them. Julie envisions a system in which brothels would be licensed and sex workers would receive certificates or cards and would be tested regularly for sexually transmitted diseases. If prostitution were legal, she says, sex workers would also be eligible for social security and health benefits, which they currently don’t have access to. “Women should have control over their own bodies,” she says. “They can get an abortion, but they can’t have a transaction involving sex. That doesn’t make any sense.”
    Legalizing or decriminalizing adult consensual sex work, Julie says, would also make it easier to crack down on traffickers and places that are run by