Senate Judiciary [Mar 11, 2026]

Good afternoon. The Senate Judiciary Committee will come to order on Wednesday, March 11. Ms. Jensen, please start us off with a roll call.

Present.

Here.

Here.

Present.

Present.

Here.

Present. All right. Thanks everyone for being here and ready to go. The one item of business on our agenda this afternoon is Senate Bill 97. We thank the sponsors for being ready to go before us. Senator Hendrickson, Senator Cutter, however you'd like to start us off concerning your plans on SB 97.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, colleagues. Good afternoon. Thank you, Senator Cutter. Thank you for being a part of this bill and this journey. and I want to give my extended thanks to representatives Lorena Garcia and Rebecca Stewart for their involvement in this as well. Legalized highly regulated sex work which is combined to prescribed spaces with permitting and licensure is really bad Really bad What typically happens in jurisdictions that take that approach to sex work is licenses and permits are controlled by a handful of wealthy brothel owners who run businesses in a highly collusionary manner and weaponize their market power to suppress wages and working conditions of sex workers. Outside of those spaces, in those systems, sex work remains illegal. But because these jurisdictions tend to become destinations for sex tourism, demand tends to increase. What results is the proliferation of a large black market sex industry that's driven even further into the shadows. Sex trafficking is exacerbated. It's no surprise that the state with the highest sex trafficking rates is Nevada. I'm vehemently opposed to such a regime and hope Colorado doesn't ever adopt that. If you're confused right now, that's understandable. Most of Coloradans I've spoken to since SB 97's introduction were also confused about the differences between sex work legalization and what Senate Bill 97 proposes. I don't fault them. This isn't exactly a policy that's at the forefront of recent political discourse, and it's not one that I expect the public to have a nuanced understanding of. I had hoped that public debate in this hearing would be productive in facilitating a greater understanding of those differences. That was a strategic miscalculation on my part. Unfortunately, some of this bill's biggest opponents knowingly and maliciously chose to misrepresent Senate Bill 97 as a legalization bill, seizing on and exacerbating public confusion. Rather than wrestle with the nuances of the very different decriminalization policy that 97 proposes, a red herring was offered instead. However savvy this strategy was, it's also dishonest and it makes for really bad policy. The criminalization framework that exists in Colorado and much of the U.S. is also really harmful. Criminalization leads to sex work being performed alone, often in complete secrecy. This results in a limited ability for sex workers to conduct screenings and background searches on potential clients. While working together with others increases visibility and exposure to arrests and prosecution, working alone means a risk to personal safety. Because the possession of a large quantity of condoms, up-front demands on condom usage, and negotiations about acts to be performed prior to the exchange of money are used as evidence in court to show that the intent was an exchange of money or thing of value for sex, a critical component of a sex work-related conviction, workers often forego these protections, resulting in riskier sex from an STI perspective. Criminal records for engaging in sex work create barriers to more traditional forms of employment. In addition to the stigma associated with it, we, the General Assembly, have recently enacted a mandated prohibition on the employment of individuals who have been convicted of engaging in sex work from ever working at a massage parlor in any capacity. Barriers to employment force those who wish to leave sex work to stay in sex work. For immigrants who are working towards permanent residency or citizenship, a single conviction for engaging in sex work is often fatal to that endeavor. In addition to the harmful impacts of criminal legal system involvement, the act of policing sex work in our current system can be very harmful unto itself. Law enforcement officers in Colorado can, and occasionally do, receive grants of immunity for certain conduct in a prostitution sting. Using these grants of immunity, officers have fully engaged in sexual activity with sex workers under the guise of being clients and making an arrest subsequent to the sexual act or acts. Let's be clear here. We're talking about engaging in sexual activity under false pretenses that significantly deviates from the conditions that we're consented to. This is, I would argue, a form of sexual assault. We take a victimless crime and create, under those false pretenses, circumstances where the sex worker is victimized, arrested, and prosecuted, while the victimizer has immunity. Right here in Colorado, direct service providers for sex worker resources report that since 2020, they've seen a significant increase in needs from people who have ended up doing street-based survival work out of desperation after losing their housing. Also, circumstances that leave them especially vulnerable to violence, arrest, and exploitation. Criminalization continues to throttle access to resources for both those seeking support and peer-led organizations. As the cost of living rises, even workers with access to income outside of the industry aren't able to entirely leave sex work and still rely on supplemental income from seen clients. Arrest and punitive actions by employers enabled by criminalization puts these workers at risk of losing jobs outside of the industry often landing them back in the industry as their only source of income. Additionally, as with legalized systems like Nevada, some of the worst exploitation occurs in the spaces that are ostensibly regulated and controlled. Where sex work is legal up until the point of sex, it's strip clubs where exploitation often occurs. Indeed, Colorado strip clubs were recently embroiled in lengthy and widespread wage-theft abuses, and there's currently investigation into human trafficking operations being run out of Colorado strip clubs by management. So to recap more physical safety risks greater STI risk greater barriers to employment and less personal autonomy That is the record of Colorado framework around sex work So what does Senate Bill 97, decriminalization, actually do? Rather than looking at sex work as an industry to be regulated, taxed, and profited from, as legalization does, decriminalization simply looks at sex between consenting adults as something that isn't the role of government to intrude on. The presence or absence of a monetary exchange is rendered irrelevant. Brothels aren't necessary, unlike in legalization, though municipalities would not be prohibited from allowing them in this bill. That choice is left to those municipalities. Don't want brothels in your town? Great. Don't have one. For the most part, sex work would happen in private residences unknown to the general public. Every statute that deals with some form of exploitation or coercion, every statute that has a victim, is left entirely intact in Senate Bill 97. What it would allow for is the opposite of the criminalization responses that consistently lead to harmful outcomes. Sex workers could work together for greater safety without the fear of greater visibility leading to exposure, surveillance, and arrest. Sex workers who see others involved in behaviors that appear coercive would be empowered to report that without fear of being surveilled themselves. They'd be better positioned to negotiate acts and terms and set early boundaries about what is and isn't permissible. they'd be able to much more thoroughly vet potential clients. Clients would be much more willing to identify themselves and cooperate with such vetting. By treating sex as a private activity between consenting adults, rather than a regulated commodity, we restore autonomy of choice to sex workers, thereby destroying the monopolistic power that exists in the current everything-but-the-sex-itself regulatory environment, which enables the often-exploitative working environments that we see in Colorado strip clubs. Laws around sex work are unique because those who are directly impacted almost always have had no say in their design. District attorneys, law enforcement, and religious figures have all had a significant hand in crafting the various laws that criminalize consensual adult sexual activity when money is involved. Those who rely on that work to make money have not. Twenty-three years ago, New Zealand flipped the script. The Prostitution Reform Act, which passed Parliament in 2003, was revolutionary in that it was actually written by sex workers. The PRA looked to laws that had already been on the books in New South Wales, Australia, for nearly a quarter of a century at that time. New South Wales was the first major jurisdiction in the modern era that had established a legal framework that was firmly rooted in decriminalization. While there had not been much research into the outcomes of New South Wales' policy, significant attention was given to New Zealand following the PRA's passage. For all the aforementioned reasons, the results were compelling. Contrary to critics' concerns, there was no increase in commercial sexual activity, but trafficking, levels of violence against sex workers, and the transmission of STIs decreased. Traditional forms of employment increased among sex workers, as did the ability to leave sex work for more traditional employment altogether among those who wanted to. Belgium, Australia's Northern Territory, and states of Victoria and Queensland, which passed decriminalization in 2022, 2019, 2023, and 2024, respectively, have all seen similar results. Right after this bill was introduced, when we pointed to the successes abroad, some high-profile opponents of the bill said, those places are too different. It's never been done here. It won't work here. Actually, it has worked here. And you might be surprised to learn that it is working here. While New Zealand was reforming its laws, so was Rhode Island, albeit in a roundabout way. There, a 2003 court ruling struck most of the criminal restrictions on sex work. Street-based sex work remained criminalized, but nothing indoors and between consenting adults was. Over the next six years, violence against sex workers decreased 40%, 40%, and STI transmissions decreased 30%, according to findings in a landmark study by Baylor Professor Scott Cunningham and UCLA Professor Manisha Shaw. While there was an increase in indoor sex work, it was offset by a decrease in street-based sex work, the part that remained criminalized, and once again, only a nominal change in overall commercial sexual activity was observed. The outcome improvements that Rhode Island experienced were quickly erased following the recriminalization of sex work by the state legislature in 2009. In January of 2021, having seen the ever-growing body of research that I've also poured through, the elected prosecuting attorney, what Michigan calls their DAs, of Washtenaw County, Eli Savitt, made a bold move. he made it the official policy of the prosecuting attorney's office to not prosecute any case where the only criminal elements of the case involved consensual adult commercial sexual activity. As is proposed in Senate Bill 97, pimping is still legal and prosecuted. Pandering where it involves coercion rather than just arranging the meetup is still illegal and prosecuted. All elements of trafficking are still illegal and prosecuted. The policy has remained in place ever since. Once again Washtenaw County which is home to 375 people Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan and which is only 15 miles west of the Detroit airport has not become a destination for sex tourism. In fact, commercial sexual activity overall has barely budged. But again, overall violence against sex workers has decreased, STI rates have decreased, sexual assaults have decreased, the policy is now in its sixth year. The success of decriminalization has resulted in it becoming the regulatory model that is endorsed by organizations such as UNAIDS, Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, the ACLU, the National Survivors Union, and the Human Rights Campaign. Senate Bill 97 makes Colorado the 10th state in the last six years to consider decriminalization legislation. So there's two big takeaways I'd like to leave the committee with. The first is that legalization is very different than decriminalization. Legalization is bad, and we don't want that. Decriminalization has worked and continues to work. Confusion between the two runs the gamut from honest misunderstandings of a policy that is fairly obscure to dishonest efforts to intentionally conflate the two. The second takeaway is that this is the policy that sex workers want. We have heard in emails and from heads of organizations that nobody wants to be involved in sex work. Nobody does this without coercion. That's simply not true, and it seeks to deny and erase the voices of sex workers in Colorado. I truly believe that there is a desire amongst some of the institutional opponents of this bill that Coloradans never get to hear from sex workers themselves. And I am grateful for the tenacity and the courage of those who have come forward to work on this bill. I'm grateful for those who are here today. I'm grateful for those who have put themselves at risk for the hope that those who come after them have a safer future than what they have experienced. Consider these quotes from sex workers in a 2021 Denver Post article about Colorado's legal framework and social attitudes around sex work. I feel like I'm not a part of society. I don't get a voice. They want to pretend we don't even exist. It feels like your life doesn't matter. Well, they do exist, they matter, and they deserve a voice. That's why the leading national organizations that provide support to sex workers also support decriminalization. National organizations including the Sex Workers Outreach Project, the Sex Workers Project, Desiree Alliance, Freedom Network, the Red Umbrella Project, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, and Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, or Coyote. Colorado organizations like Don't Strip Our Rights, the Liza Strada Cooperative, the Southwest Healing Collective, Black Sex Workers of Colorado. the mantra is rights, not rescue. Finally, Coloradans of all stripes can, and do, have different opinions on sexual morality. What I hope we someday find common ground on is the belief that even if we don't agree with the morality of the activity, we can agree on the inherent value and dignity of the individuals involved. So much of the moral panic surrounding this policy denies that inherent dignity. And that's what I find to be really morally unconscionable. 51 years ago, following inadequate police response to the murders of two sex workers, amidst a punitive criminal enforcement regime very similar to what exists in Colorado, more than 100 sex workers occupied the Saint-Nizier church in Lyons, France, for eight days, beginning on June 2, 1975. They demanded better conditions and an end to harassment from the police and government more broadly. A wave of solidarity protests followed in Paris, Marseille, Montpellier, Grenoble, St. Etienne, and later throughout Europe. To this day, June 2nd is observed around the world as International Sex Workers Day. It continues to be a day of protest and advocacy for justice, rights, and dignity. Mr. Chair, I move that Senate Bill 97 be laid over until June 2nd, 2026.

All right, Ms. Jensen. Senators Carson.

Yes.

Wallace.

Zamora Wilson.

Roberts.

Mr. Chair.