DNA Database of Men Who Pay for Sex? The Strange Push to Make Cops Collect DNA from Suspected Johns

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Melissa Gira Grant

DNA Database of Men Who Pay for Sex? The Strange Push to Make Cops Collect DNA from Suspected Johns
Law enforcement and conservative campaigners want to threaten men who buy sex with the possibility of being marked for life in a government database.

January 27, 2012 |


For the last six years, police across the United States have been empowered by federal and state law to collect DNA from the people they arrest in order to build a government DNA database. The database includes those who have yet to face trial as well as people who are later found innocent. Now a group of researchers, law enforcement and conservative campaigners want to exploit people's concerns about being included in such a database in order to scare people out of involvement in the sex trade. By threatening people with the possibility of being marked for life in a government database, these well-funded campaigners -- with allies in law enforcement, including the Department of Justice -- are using a questionably legal policing practice, a combination of "scared-straight" strategies that became a signature of the war on drugs and the extension of the surveillance state propelled by the war on terror.

DNA databases have the power to extend government surveillance to the cellular level. In 2005, a provision added to the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act permitted the collection and indefinite retention of DNA from, as the Center for Constitutional Rights understood at the time, "anyone arrested for any crime whether or not they are convicted, any non-U.S. citizen detained or stopped by federal authorities for any reason, and everyone in federal prison.”

In the intervening years, there have been several challenges to pre-conviction DNA collection and retention, with some courts divided as to whether or not DNA collection is a violation of the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

Despite the questionable constitutionality of pre-conviction DNA collection, an organization called Demand Abolition has commissioned a study proposing that men who buy sex should be added to government DNA databases. Demand Abolition, which is engaged in a national campaign to increase arrests and criminal penalties for prostitution, claims these "crimes justify mandatory DNA testing," in order to serve as "a deterrent to buying sex, as most people who commit crimes do not want their DNA samples taken." Demand Abolition explicitly recognizes and exploits the consequences of being added to a government DNA database for people arrested merely under suspicion of committing misdemeanors, and who have not yet been tried or convicted. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/sex/153918/dna_database_of_men_who_pay_for_sex_the_strange_push_to_make_cops_collect_dna_from_suspected_johns/

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. Prior thread in GD

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002232846

[xchrom]

2. du rec. nt

[dickthegrouch]

3. Isn't buying a ring paying for sex?

Certainly buying dinner, or paying for the entry to a disco, or movie, is

Watch the movie "Paris Is Burning" for an interesting perspective on who pays for what and when.

[midnight]

4. This is odd... Why do they care?