Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

Youth curfews are bad ideas whose time has come.

Margaret Davidson from the November 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

According to the Conference of Mayors study, crime in most cities with curfews went down after the ordinances were imposed. Twenty-six cities with a nighttime but no daytime curfew were able to provide the relevant data; according to those figures, juvenile crime rates declined by an average of 21 percent. Twenty-two cities with both day and night curfews had data to offer; they too boasted a 21 percent decrease.

But curfew opponents have raised questions about this data. Dan Macallair, associate director of the nonprofit Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, notes that juvenile crime has been declining in general since 1992. To determine whether curfews were a factor in the drop, the center's Justice Policy Institute examined data from the state of California from 1978 through 1996--the first comprehensive study of the issue.

Their answer was unequivocal. "This study found that youth curfews do not reduce youth crime," Macallair and study co-author Mike Males wrote. "This was true for any race of youth, for any region, for any type of crime. In those few instances in which a significant effect on youth crime was found, curfews were more likely to be associated with an increase in youth crime (not including curfew citations)."

Macallair and Males compared changes in crime rates with changes in curfew-enforcement rates. (Some curfews are barely enforced, so it's not enough to note whether a town simply has a curfew.) To capture local variations, they also compared curfew arrest rates and youth crime rates for the 12 most populous counties in the state and for cities with populations over 100,000 in Los Angeles and Orange counties. They examined the ratio of youth crime rates to adult crime rates for each year, compared with curfew enforcement rates. They found "no support for the proposition that stricter curfew enforcement reduces youth crime either absolutely or relative to adults, by location, or by type of crime."

As for Monrovia: According to the Justice Policy Institute study, that city's curfew was actually associated with crime increases. "Monrovia's school day curfew...has been widely touted as a success, even winning an emotional endorsement from President Clinton during a campaign stop in Monrovia," the report said. But "youth crime skyrocketed by 53% during the school months when the curfew is most vigorously enforced, yet declined by 12% in the summer months when the curfew was not enforced."

Macallair and Males also found evidence of racial bias in enforcement of the Monrovia curfew. While about 55 percent of Monrovia's population aged 10 to 17 is not white, people of color accounted for 68 percent of those arrested for curfew violations. Most major counties did not have such disparities; in those places, the police seemed to be enforcing the curfews evenhandedly. But Monrovia wasn't the only jurisdiction with a worrisome arrest record: In Fresno and Santa Clara counties, for example, young Latinos were five times more likely to be arrested for curfew violations than white teenagers. Young blacks were three times as likely to be arrested.

Juvenile crime isn't even highest during typical evening curfew hours. It's more likely to take place right after school. In the January 1999 issue of Crime & Delinquency, Craig Hemmens of Boise State University and Katherine Bennett of Armstrong Atlantic State University reported that less than one-fifth of violent juvenile crime took place during normal curfew hours. Given that, they commented, "reliance on curfews to substantially reduce juvenile crime may be misplaced, at best."

Despite all this evidence, curfews remain popular with politicians around the country. And in the atmosphere that has followed the Littleton shootings, they aren't likely to go away anytime soon.

For Hemmens and Bennett, curfews are simply "the latest fad" in "a field strewn with the remnants of quick fixes to a serious problem." They add: "The recent surge in the popularity of curfew enactment and enforcement and the urgency with which some cities have turned to them, almost as a panacea, suggest that juvenile curfews are a sign of public hysteria rather than a reasoned response to juvenile crime and delinquency."

In other words, curfews are a bad idea whose time has come.