So Home Secretary Jacqui Smith wants to 'tackle' prostitution.

How adorable. How naive. How certain to garner column inches. And to utterly fail in its stated intent.

Quite apart from whether it is right to criminalise the act of selling or buying sex - which you can assume I am against - there is the question of what effect, either beneficial or detrimental, attacking the sex trade may have.

I am no great fan of prohibition. In some cases, it can work on a limited basis - the handgun ban, for instance, is easy to enforce because handguns are difficult to obtain and nearly impossible to make. Alcohol prohibition, as demonstrated in the US in the early 20th century, was more difficult: it does not take a genius to make your own spirits. In short, effective banning depends on the ability to completely stem the flow of supply in the hope that demand will dry up as a result.

Whether this is the either a right or effective way to approach a social problem is for better minds than mine to decide - in my opinion, neither situation justified the scale of the response, and neither result was something that could not have been achieved through better means.

Following on from that, how, exactly, can one effectively police the selling of sex? We all have sex organs and (those of us not touched by the credit crisis at least) money. If I, in my home, have a verbal agreement with a man who did not meet me through any advertisement, who then offers me money, how is anyone going to know? No, what this will be doing in effect is policing not prostitution in general, but streetwalking in particular. In other words, targeting the people who are most likely to be at risk of drug abuse and other problems.

The intial idea is to 'name and shame' kerb crawlers, and to impose harsh sentences on men who use the services of trafficked women. As opposed to the more logical route of, say, imposing harsh sentences on those doing the trafficking, which would be difficult but worthwhile. In other words, what Mizz Smith is proposing is shooting at a blank wall and drawing your target around the hole.

We know where this will end, naturally - it is no secret that the real agenda of Harriet Harman and Jacqui Smith is to criminalise prostitution as a whole. By dressing up the early stages in faux-concern for exploited women, they are doing nothing more than putting lipstck on a pig.

And what would be the problem with that, you might say. Give someone time in custody, with access to the various social and mental health services, and that might get them back on their feet.

Ah, there's the rub. I have known a few streetwalkers - years before I went on the game myself. If you're familiar with my books, you will know these as the women my (misguided, optimistic) father was trying to 'help'. A fair number of them were occasional drug users to full-blown addicts and some were homeless; nearly all were single mothers. I came away with a few interesting points of knowledge:

1. If you go to prison with no intention of reforming when you get there, all it provides is a great place to meet new drug connections for when you are out again.

2. Separating a woman from her child, apart from cases of child abuse, is possibly the most detrimental thing that can happen to both of them.

3. Never get your hair dyed in prison. Never.