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It was well after midnight on a Thursday in Chinatown last fall when police in a sting operation nabbed three men for allegedly soliciting sex from women they thought were prostitutes.

The arrests made headlines, mostly because two of the men were high school teachers who had been downtown for a high school fundraiser earlier that night. After a six-month period, the charges against the two were deferred — that is, dismissed — and each was required to pay a $500 fine. Their friend, who was also fined $500, was sentenced to three days in jail, which he served in late April.

“They got the maximum fines and one of them even got jail, which is pretty unusual,” said Jim Fulton, spokesman for the Honolulu prosecutor’s office. “The deferral is typical for a first-time offense. We typically argue against it but it’s always granted. Almost always.”

In Hawaii, maximum fines and maximum sentences for a first-time offender convicted of soliciting a prostitute are both among the lowest in the nation. Laws designed to punish or deter so-called johns vary by state, but only South Carolina, Nebraska and Kentucky have lower maximum fines for first offenders than Hawaii. First offenders in Alabama, for example, can pay up to $6,000 and face up to one year in jail. Most states categorize first offenses as some level of misdemeanor, meaning the majority of first offenders across the United States have the opportunity to remove a prostitution conviction from their records.

Soliciting a prostitute in Hawaii is classified as a petty misdemeanor, with the same possible penalties as shoplifting, underage drinking, disorderly conduct and riding a bicycle on a sidewalk. The adults who staged a sit-in in at Gov. Linda Lingle’s office to protest public school furloughs in April were charged with trespassing, also a petty misdemeanor. But suspects in other, more serious crimes, too, face petty misdemeanor charges: Drunk drivers and drag racers, as well as those who violate hunting safety laws or fail to report child abuse.

Under Hawaii law, a first-offender convicted of soliciting prostitutes is charged with a petty misdemeanor. While the standard maximum fine for someone convicted of a petty misdemeanor in Hawaii is $1,000, there’s a legal exception made for johns, who face a lower mandatory fine of $500. Consistent with petty misdemeanor standards, convicted first-offender johns also face up to 30 days in jail.

Second offenders, too, face petty-misdemeanor charges, but without the option of having those charges removed from their record. Last month, the governor extended to 2012 a two-year-old law under which johns convicted for a third time in a 10-year period face more serious misdemeanor charges and a “habitual offender” designation. Habitual offenders face fines of up to $2,000 and up to one year in jail, but are not placed in any registry.

Officials in Honolulu say they can’t determine exactly how many prostitutes there are on Oahu, though the rate of prostitution arrests had — until it plummeted last year — long been more than one per day. In 2009, the Honolulu Police Department reported 276 prostitution arrests compared with 393 in 2008. Police spokeswoman Michelle Yu said those numbers include all prostitution arrests, with no separate records detailing how many of those arrested were charged with prostitution versus solicitation.

Whether fewer overall prostitution arrests last year indicate a local sex industry that’s getting smaller or growing smarter, though, is neither clear nor quantifiable. Either way, police say effectively curbing prostitution in Hawaii requires more aggressive policy-making.

“Stricter laws would create a greater deterrence…both for the girls and for the johns,” wrote Maj. Susan Dowsett, who heads the Honolulu Police Department’s Narcotics/Vice Division, via e-mail. “Right now, our existing laws do not create much of a deterrence.”

Targeting Demand

In recent years, law enforcement officials across the nation have looked beyond fines and jail time as deterrents. Many municipalities offer post-arrest education programs, popularly known as john schools, with participation required for first offenders seeking deferral of charges against them.

Typically, those who attend john schools pay to enroll in day- or weekend-long programs, and their monies are used to fund their participation, as well as other programs supporting women and girls leaving the sex industry. One of the country’s foremost john schools, the San Francisco-based First Offender Prostitution Program, earned acclaim for policy innovation from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University more than a decade ago.

“John schools have since become a common approach,” said Allen Wilson, co-executive director of Standing Against Global Exploitation, or SAGE, a nonprofit that helped found the First Offender Prostitution Program. “The idea is to target demand. We could work on the supply end forever and I doubt we would ever make any headway. We can help women get out but that’s not going to stop traffickers and pimps from just stepping up their recruiting. As long as there’s demand, they’re going to be there. Human nature being what it is, I don’t believe we will ever fully solve the problem, but I think we can do a lot on the demand side through education.”

Wilson said education at john school includes a presentation by a nurse practitioner on the health risks associated with buying sex, an explanation from law enforcement officials and former prostitutes of how the trafficking system works, and the manner in which prostitutes — mostly girls and women — are drafted into that system, as well as counseling opportunities for those who identify as sex addicts. While lessons on sexually transmitted diseases may be graphic, researchers find they aren’t what make john schools effective.

“Attempting to scare people with slides of STDs is a boogeyman approach that just doesn’t work,” said Dennis Dunn, director of the Victim Witness Kokua Services division in the Honolulu Department of the Prosecuting Attorney, and member of a task force trying to develop strategies to address prostitution in Honolulu. “The fact is, many johns and prostitutes already know more about safe sex than the average person on the street. What’s clear is you have to be able to challenge social values and allow johns to understand prostitution as a form of rape, show them that what they’re paying for is the brutalization of women in their community. That is what it’s all about. It’s not about the fact that they might get an STD. It’s not about the fact that they might get arrested again.”

According to a March 2008 evaluation of San Francisco’s first offenders program by the U.S. Department of Justice, the approach Dunn describes seems to be working.

“In the evaluation, they looked at re-arrests statewide, not just county-wide,” said SAGE’s Wilson. “They found that 83 percent did not recidivate in California.”

While that statistic by no means guarantees that 83 percent of those who attended the john school didn’t simply solicit prostitutes outside of California or without being caught, the evaluation did cite other markers of success. In addition to finding the program to be both effective and cost-effective, those who prepared the 2008 evaluation wrote that the concept was “transferable,” having been successfully replicated on more than three-dozen occasions since SAGE launched its john school.

Johns Fund Schools

Honolulu officials say they’ve only had preliminary conversations about possibly implementing a john school for local offenders, and that those conversations are characterized by concern about the logistics of doing so.

“There have been discussions on and off about john schools in Honolulu but there are many issues associated with that,” said Renee Sonobe Hong, deputy prosecutor for the city. “Who’s going to set it up? Where is the funding going to come from? What if you have a tourist john who gets arrested and convicted for prostitution here in Hawaii? Do you do john school here or do you do it on the mainland?”

The funding issue, at least, is one that other cities have resolved. San Francisco’s First Offender Prostitution Program is funded by johns themselves—the fees they pay to participate also subsidize some police vice operations and recovery programs for girls and women involved in commercial sex—without cost to taxpayers. In Seattle, a similar program is fully funded by the people it serves. This is possible in part because first-time offenders, who are required to take the class, are also required to pay hefty fines.

“If you are a first-time offender, you have to take the class, and pay a total of $1,300,” said Nick Zajchowski, policy analyst at the Municipal Court of Seattle. “The way the accounting is set up for the program, it’s fully self-sustaining.”

The Seattle program also offers classes for prostitutes, a strategy that Hawaii lawmakers have indicated is important to them. In the 2010 legislative session, Rep. Marilyn Lee sponsored one of two bills calling for the creation of john schools in Hawaii. Dunn said Lee’s House Bill 1937 was ultimately rejected, largely because it detailed the logistics behind creating a school for solicitors without including a program for prostitutes.

“The bill didn’t get any further because we have the same laws covering both prostitutes and johns,” said Dunn. “So in fairness, not just legislatively but to the issue itself, they had to ask: If johns have to go to john school, why couldn’t prostitutes also go?”

‘Boys Will Be Boys’ Mentality

While prostitutes and johns may be equal in the eyes of the law, they aren’t necessarily equal in the eyes of law enforcement. HPD can’t provide numbers detailing a discrepancy, but prosecutors say prostitutes tend to be arrested in much higher numbers than johns, in Honolulu and elsewhere. They argue it’s not a matter of prioritizing prostitute arrests but a product of prostitutes being more visible than johns. They also explain that sting operations to catch johns — which usually require female officers to play the role of prostitutes — require more time and resources than operations aimed at busting prostitutes. But SAGE’s Wilson said it illustrates an underlying bias that tends to target prostitutes rather than those who solicit them.

“That’s true [in] a lot of places because this mentality of ‘boys will be boys,’” said Wilson. “That mentality also lives within the law, and a lot of public officials don’t see it as the problem. They see the prostitutes as the problem because they’re the ones on the streets.”

Local officials acknowledge that, socially at least, harmful notions about gender identity, such as the idea that a young man’s first visit to a prostitute might be a rite of passage, persist, and are exacerbated by a cultural milieu unique to Hawaii.

“Hawaii attracts Asian tourists who find it exotic to have sex with Caucasian women, and tourists from the mainland who find it exotic to have sex with Asian and Polynesian women,” said Dunn. “Then, unfortunately, there is the intersection of this exotic eroticism and the kinds of images that have long promoted women of color as sex objects, as a way to draw tourists to Hawaii.”

On top of regional complexities, Dunn said, it’s “safe to say” that post-9/11 security constraints that might deter people in the U.S. from traveling internationally, may further promote Hawaii as a prostitution destination.

“I think Hawaii for years has had kind of an ambivalent stance toward prostitution, and I think there’s still ambivalence,” said Rep. Karl Rhoads, who calls prostitution and related violence in his Chinatown district a dangerous and persistent problem. “I’m sure tourists in Waikiki go to prostitutes fairly routinely as part of a vacation, and we are in direct competition with destinations in other parts of the world where prostitution is legal.”

Rhoads, who introduced the “habitual offenders” bill the governor extended this year, also proposed a measure in the 2010 session that would have made it a misdemeanor offense for someone to solicit sex within 750 feet of a school or park. While that proposal didn’t advance this year, he said he’ll reintroduce a similar measure if re-elected.

Meantime, one of the greatest concerns to law enforcement officials is how much of sex work has actually disappeared from view, as sex trafficking operations shift to take place behind closed doors, in massage parlors and, most of all, on the Internet. Last year, for example, Honolulu police officials used a Google maps document, created by a website promoting prostitution, to track the location of prostitutes across Oahu.

“Many contacts, if not most, are now made via on-line sites,” wrote HPD’s Dowsett. “When a prostitute gets a arrested in one location and as that case or other similar cases work their way through the criminal justice system, when the ‘heat’ from possible jail time is on, they move.”

Ultimately, those concerned with ending prostitution in Hawaii say it will require a multi-faceted approach.

“Almost any program is going to do some good,” said Dunn. “But you have to have public education along with all of this. John school is great for people who get caught, but what about those who don’t? And what about those who just see prostitution, in passing, as an attractive nuisance? We have to reach them, too.”