Current Curfew Laws Are Outdated and Need to Be Revised

According to Janet Reitman’s journal article titled “Fight For Your Rights: Curfews for Kids” published by Scholastic, Inc. on 1998, Tiana Hutchins a 16-year-old girl from Washington, D.C was chatting with her friends on a neighborhood street corner, after 11 pm. It never occurred to Tiana that chatting with her friends on a street corner was a crime. That was until, a Washington, D.C., police officer ordered her to go inside or face arrest for violation of Washington's curfew law. This law prohibits anyone under the age of 17 from being in a public place after 11 PM on weekdays. Tiana says, "It is unfair to punish good kids who are out trying to make something of themselves when only a small percentage of young people are committing crimes in the city during curfew hours". Unfortunately there are many similar curfew laws to this extent throughout the United States. According to Martin Morse Wooster in his article titled “Be Nice to Policemen” published by The American Enterprise Institute in July of 1999, about 75% of the nation's 200 biggest cities have curfew laws, most imposed after 1990. Current curfew laws are outdated, have inadequate causes, and have no statistical correlations between young adults and illegal behavior.

Outlawing harmless behavior to prevent crime has long been the status qua particularly for young people, in spite of uncertain evidence of its effectiveness. Many times people take on obvious correlations between youth behavior and social problems and remove their constitutional rights with the very slight, or almost no evidence of its necessity. The most obvious example of this is the use of curfew laws, which have been challenged on a number of constitutional grounds. Regardless of their immense use acro...

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...onnection between curfew laws and school shootings. The observation of rapidly increasing juvenile crime may simply be increased attention to it. Despite the massive amount of expert evidence in support of curfew laws, there is no experiential evidence that curfew laws actually work. If Mike Males and Dan Macallair are biased in their study, then why are law enforcement agencies, or any other institution, completely unwilling to examine their study and conduct similar experimental studies? The proper response to crime, including juvenile crime, is to arrest people suspected of criminal behavior, not to keep millions of innocent, law-abiding young people under house arrest. If there is no final evidence of the efficiency of youth curfew laws, after decades of use, then there is no “compelling state interest” necessary to deny young people their constitutional rights.