30 April, 2014

An End to New York's War on Condoms? - Hit & Run : Reason.com

An End to New York's War on Condoms? - Hit & Run : Reason.com: In a 2012 report from the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center (UJC) and The PROS Network, half of sex workers surveyed said they sometimes didn't carry condoms for fear of law enforcement repercussions or had unprotected sex after police had confiscated condoms. "It's not a myth," Sienna Baskin, co-director of the Sex Workers Project at the UJC, told The Village Voice last year. "The practice of using condoms as evidence is very prevalent in New York."

But this isn't a police practice limited to New York. Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh are just a few cities where condoms can still be used as evidence. San Francisco only recently ended the practice. Carrying condoms is still criminalized in all of Louisiana and North Carolina.