Book Review

This study is meant primarily as a contribution to a field whose central concept has been thoroughly discredited but that nevertheless refuses to make a graceful exit from curricula: the sociology of "deviance." Curiously, in writing about indoor prostitutes in St. Paul in the decades before the social purity movement, Joel Best does not in fact treat them as "deviants." The madams, about whom he has the most information (his sources have little information about ordinary prostitutes and no information about customers), come across as savvy businesswomen who knew how to strike deals with police and other authorities and how to play real estate markets. And yet Best continues to use the term "deviance," without quotation marks, to argue that official "prohibition" strategies, such as criminalization, were enforced only sporadically and could easily coexist with informal tactics that sought to regulate, not prohibit, a particular activity.

1

For most of the period studied, the method for controlling brothels was to call the madams into court once a month to be "punished" with a fine that acted as a license. A couple of times, evangelical preachers or reform-minded politicians attempted to circumvent the police by seeking felony charges, but this strategy was foiled since, if police court judges were lenient in imposing only standard fines, juries were even more lenient: They repeatedly refused to convict.

. . .