Since 1996, when President Bill Clinton urged cities and towns to impose nightly curfews on teenagers, more than 400 towns, cities and counties have enacted laws that do just that. In response to growing public concern over crime, more than a dozen cities and counties have reinstated or enforced juvenile curfews this year, including Washington, D.C.; Memphis; New Smyrna Beach, Fla.; Sea Isle City, N.J.; and Fulton County, Ga. Philadelphia and Chicago made their curfews permanent last year.
This return to a familiar tool flies in the face of research that suggests curfews are ineffective and raises concerns among juvenile justice advocates about possible unintended consequences such as increased racial profiling, and strained relationships between police and teens, Pew's Stateline reports.
“If you limit the opportunity for youth to be out at 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock, one o’clock and two o’clock in the morning, you limit and control that exposure, and then you put it back where it ought to be — in the home,” said Vicksburg, Miss., Mayor George Flaggs Jr., where the city reinstated its curfew following a shooting in January that killed a 13-year-old and left two others injured.
The city also has instituted a community policing program and allocated $200,000 in funding for a center where children and their families can receive mentoring, tutoring and mental health support.
That less punitive approach motivated a Texas state representative, Republican David Cook, to propose a statewide ban on curfews that prohibits both cities and counties from imposing them. The ban will take effect in September.
Cook said he hopes to see “a better relationship between juveniles and law enforcement agencies” as a result of the statewide ban on curfews. Cook also raised concerns that curfews could violate constitutional rights.
“There’s a lot that we can do as a state to improve the juvenile system,” Cook said in an interview with Stateline. “The more that we can have community-based programs, the better off juveniles are going to be with regard to trying to reform their behavior for a better future.”
Some cities, including Washington, Baltimore and Atlanta, are changing how they handle curfews — opting to reduce or eliminate fines and other penalties and instead provide violators with educational and community-based programs, such as counseling, mentoring and recreational activities. In other jurisdictions, parents and guardians can still receive fines or even go to jail if their kids violate curfew.
U.S. juvenile curfews are “ineffective at reducing crime and victimization,” according to a review summarizing the findings of 12 studies that was published in 2016 by the Campbell Collaboration, an international social science research network. The review also found a slight increase in crime during curfew hours and no effect on non-curfew hours.
But some local officials have said curfew enforcement led to a decrease in crime within their jurisdictions.
In Prince George’s County, Maryland, where local leaders enforced a juvenile curfew last year, officials reported a 20% decrease in overall crime during curfew hours in the first month of enforcement.
Juvenile curfews may result in increased racial profiling, said William Carbone, a lecturer and the executive director of the Tow Youth Justice Institute at the University of New Haven. “I don’t have a lot of faith in curfews at all,” Carbone said in an interview with Stateline. “When you implement a measure, like curfews, you run the risk of creating worse relationships between the youth and the police, and run the risk of profiling. … It’s just one of the areas where kids of color are disproportionately disadvantaged.”
Carbone said that diversion — approaches that redirect youth away from the juvenile justice system — works as a proactive measure to engage and prevent youth crime.
At least 11,680 children under the age of 17 were arrested in 2020 for curfew violations or loitering, according to statistics released by the Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Federal data shows that for decades, Black minors have been arrested for curfew and loitering charges at two or three times the rate of their white counterparts. The overall juvenile arrest rate, which includes all offenses, peaked in 1996 and has since declined.
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