Many of you will be outraged by this story, and many more of you will pretend to be outraged by this story if it comes up in front of your wife or girlfriend. And the story is outrageous. It’s sexist and clearly unethical.

But… doesn’t hiring strippers to pose as paralegals and then sending them into jail to “service” your defendants / clients sound like the most natural business strategy in the world? Supply, meet some serious demand.

Hey, rich corporate clients get this treatment all the time. I don’t just mean that figuratively. I’m sure that there have been lawyers who literally brought their clients to a strip club after they closed the deal on their representation. We all know that firms put the prettiest secretaries on the floors clients see, while the floors with associates who share offices are staffed by hagravens. T&A has been used to secure clients probably since we moved out of the state of nature.

Lawyers in the great city of Miami are just taking this natural service and extending to to criminal defendants. What’s so wrong with that?

We mentioned this story from the Miami New Times in Non-Sequiturs last night. Gawker ran a piece on it today. The “scam,” if we must call it that, is beautiful in its simplicity. From the New Times:

Stripteases, sexual favors, booze, porn mags, and fat stacks of cash would be run-of-the-mill in many Miami strip clubs. But at downtown’s maximum security Federal Detention Center? Multiple attorneys interviewed by Riptide say the FDC visitor rooms have been taken over by South American pole dancers posing as paralegals for wealthy drug lords inside. Lawyers hired by the accused narco dons allegedly list the scantily clad women as “legal assistants,” and the FDC lets them in. Meanwhile, attorneys who refuse to go along risk losing their clients to lawyers with busty beauties on staff. “They take off their tops and let the guys touch them,” veteran defense attorney Hugo Rodriguez says. “The majority of these young, very attractive women are noncitizens brought in exclusively for the purposes of visiting the FDC. Any lawyer can sign a form and designate a legal assistant. There is no way of verifying it. The process is being abused.”

The process isn’t the only thing being abused!

Is this really hurting anybody? We’re not talking about international sexual slavery of immigrant women, are we? We’re talking about strippers who not only are being paid to do their work, but also get to put “legal assistant” on their résumés. I can think of at least one stripper who would sign up for that.

I suppose there is a safety concern. Strippers are normally in an open club with bouncers around to protect them, not in a private screening room with an undersexed offender. Unless they’re in the champagne room. But, anyway, I don’t see anybody complaining about the safety of the strippers. And if you are the incarcerated criminal, you have a strong incentive not to mistreat your sex servant while you’re on lockdown, unless you want to go back to prison bitches.

In fact, instead of advocates worried about the safety of the strippers, we have people complaining about crap like this:

Female lawyers say the phony paralegals are an embarrassment. “I find it offensive,” says an attorney who asked to remain anonymous. “This is still kind of a male-dominated profession. We try to be taken seriously, but these women aren’t helping.”

If you feel that you are taken less seriously because some other woman prostitutes herself to prisoners, you’re doing it wrong. If this anonymous critic is a paralegal, and attractive, I’m sure it must suck walking around town and having everybody in the court system think you are a stripper. But if she’s an attorney trying to make it rain, she should try hiring a stripper for her clients instead of worrying over what these strippers are doing for the cause of womanhood. Men are more likely to spend money with people who provide them with pretty girls to look at. Sorry.

If I’m going to feel sorry for somebody, it’s the young woman who is not otherwise a stripper or a prostitute but ends up doing this work because she’s got no other employment options. You can kind of imagine a girl like that showing up for an interview at a law office thinking she’s got a real opportunity to be a professional and better herself. But then she finds that (once again) men are pigs and they only want her because she looks good in a business suit that’s crumpled up on the floor. That’s got to be crushing, and maybe putting a young woman in that situation is enough to make a person outraged.

Then again, showing up to work at a law firm and then finding out you are nothing more than a whore for clients is a pretty common experience for young people in the legal trade.

Miami’s Federal Jail Overrun With Strippers Posing As Paralegals, Lawyers Say [Miami New Times]

The Federal Jail in Miami Is Basically a Topless Bar Without the Bottle Service [Gawker]