Last week, Marylène Lévesque, a 22-year-old sex worker employed by a Quebec City massage parlour, was murdered by 51-year-old Eustachio Gallese. Lévesque agreed to meet with the man at a hotel in the city’s Ste-Foy district, but never made it home. Gallese later surrendered to local police and told them to retrieve her body from his hotel room.

The death of a young woman is horrific enough. But the details that would soon surface would make many of us question the inner failings of our justice system and a world that continues to treat sex workers as dispensable.

In 2006, Gallese was sentenced to life in prison for the brutal death of his girlfriend, with no possibility of parole for 15 years. Thirty-two-year-old Chantale Deschenes had been savagely beaten to death with a hammer and repeatedly stabbed. Gallese then took the time to scribble vile insults about her on the bedroom wall before turning himself in to police. This wasn’t a one-time offence. He already had a history of conjugal violence with a previous partner in 1997.

Even though the Parole Board initially found that he posed “a high risk of violence,” they later inexplicably changed that to a “moderate risk” and nine years later Gallese won conditional release to a halfway house. He had been out on day parole since March of 2019. While out, he was apparently allowed to see sex workers “in order to address [his] sexual needs.”

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Very important quote from in the article:

When the Parole Board decided to allow Gallese to see sex workers as a halfway solution to his needs being met and his anger defused, they consciously or unconsciously took the decision to treat sex workers as less than human. They didn’t consider sex workers as part of the public they aimed to protect. Instead, they treated them as possible collateral damage, as the frontline to probable violence. It was an experiment they were willing to undertake with the bodies and lives of sex workers.

They knowingly gambled with these women’s safety as a way to provide a convicted violent killer with a human outlet. Even if the risk of violence was “moderate,” it wouldn’t be faced by the general public. After all, sex workers sign away their rights to safety and dignity when they start working in this field, right?

By treating sex workers as a non-consenting panacea for misogyny and violent tendencies, the parole board placed this young woman in a position where she was unknowingly providing services to a violent man who felt entitled to her, her body and, eventually, her life. 

After losing his bench in a Democratic sweep the night before, Harris County Juvenile Court Judge Glenn Devlin released nearly all of the youthful defendants that appeared in front him on Wednesday morning, simply asking the kids whether they planned to kill anyone before letting them go.

“He was releasing everybody,” said public defender Steven Halpert, who watched the string of surprising releases. “Apparently he was saying that’s what the voters wanted.”

Waiting for this to be used in a statistical study in 6 years showing it was a net benefit.

I would not be shocked. Years ago I read a bunch of papers about the juvenile justice system (I wish I could remember where), and found that every single traditional sentence/intervention is counterproductive. However punitive they are or aren’t, they all involve putting teenagers who have committed crimes in the same place as a lot of other teenagers who have committed crimes; it’s not too hard to figure out why that’s a bad idea.