Adult Movie Theatres in Providence

What is open right now

The twenty-nine year gap in the law

In 1980 the Rhode Island General Assembly set out to tidy up the state’s prostitution statutes and make them more specific. In doing it, the drafters removed the section covering the act itself. What was left made street solicitation an offence and said nothing about what happened indoors.

Nobody acted on it for twenty-three years. The gap became real in 2003, when the Rhode Island Supreme Court decided State v. DeMagistris and held that the solicitation law was aimed at hawking in public and could not reach private conduct. The lawyer Michael J. Kiselica then used that ruling to get charges dismissed against four women arrested at Providence spas, and from that point everyone knew.

State Representative Joanne Giannini brought bills to close it in 2005 and again in 2009. The second one passed both chambers in late October and Governor Donald Carcieri signed it on 3 November 2009.

The window left behind an unusually clean piece of evidence, because the change was accidental rather than argued for. The economists Scott Cunningham and Manisha Shah examined the six years it was openly in force and found that reported rapes with female victims fell by around 30 per cent, and female gonorrhoea cases by around 40 per cent, against what the trend would otherwise predict.

Those are the study’s figures and its authors’ reading of them, and the paper has been argued over since. It is on this page because of how rare the setup is. Almost everything else in this directory is a city deliberately tightening a rule and then counting what happened. Rhode Island loosened one by accident and did not notice for two decades.

What that has to do with two arcades on Allens Avenue

Not much directly, which is the point worth making plainly. The booths were never what the 1980 amendment touched, and closing the gap in 2009 did not shut them.

But it tells you what kind of state this is to trade in. Rhode Island never built the apparatus the rest of this directory is made of: no 1,500-foot buffers like Houston, no licensing board that stops issuing like Washington, no censor with the mayor behind him like Milwaukee. It is the smallest state in the country and it spent a generation not noticing its own statute book. Somewhere in that is the reason a new arcade could open here in 2020.