Colorado Democrats Advance Controversial Prostitution Decriminalization Plan

By Tyler O’Neil | The Daily Signal

Colorado Democrats have filed a bill that could make it the first state to decriminalize prostitution, and critics warn that the bill would make the Centennial State the “Wild West” for purchasing sex and lead to an increase in human trafficking.

“We have a billion-dollar budget shortfall here in Colorado, and so there’s a lot of talk about budget and affordability and cost of living,” Jarvis Caldwell, the Republican minority leader in the state House of Representatives, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday.

“This isn’t the Republicans’ idea of making things more affordable, by making it easier to sell yourself for sex,” he quipped.

Caldwell noted that Colorado had the 10th highest rate of human trafficking in the United States (both in the raw number of cases and as a per capita rate) in 2023, according to the Colorado-based Common Sense Institute. He also cited a 2012 study from the London School of Economics, finding that foreign countries that legalized or decriminalized prostitution had higher rates of human trafficking.

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