Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

Reason, Nov, 1999 by Margaret Davidson

Youth curfews are a bad idea whose lime has come.

MONROVIA, CALIFORNIA. A 16-year-old en route to a fast-food restaurant is stopped and questioned five times, by five different police officers. Two homeschooled brothers are stopped 20 times as they walk to and from special classes. A 22-year-old woman is questioned twice, once by a plain-clothes officer and once by an officer in uniform, as she tries to use a public telephone. An especially young-looking high school graduate is questioned on at least 10 occasions. Yet none of these people have committed a crime.

Monrovia is one of the many American cities that have imposed curfews on their teenagers over the last several years. A 1997 survey of 347 municipalities by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that 80 percent had a nighttime youth curfew, up from 70 percent two years earlier. In almost half of those cities, the curfews had been imposed within the previous 10 years.

In 1994, Monrovia adopted a daytime curfew, aimed at controlling truancy as well as juvenile crime, and many other cities have followed its lead. Some towns - about 20 percent of those surveyed by the Conference of Mayors - have curfews in both the day and the evening, leaving only a narrow window of time in which young people can wander without fear of the local gendarmes. In those places, teens have to consider the time of day carefully before engaging in as innocent an activity as walking the family dog.

Some minors, of course, are exempt from the curfews. Some go to schools with year-round schedules, with different students taking their vacations at different times. Others have graduated early or are in work-study programs. Some are homeschooled. Some are simply tourists, visiting the area with their families.

But even these teenagers can be detained and questioned. In Monrovia, the police chief asked parents to register exempted children with the police department and have them carry a numbered card when out during curfew hours, a request that reminded some citizens of document checks in totalitarian states. The Home School Legal Defense Association has produced a poster that says, "Do daytime curfews work? Ask the experts." Below the text are pictures of Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin.

Such comparisons may be overblown, but curfew opponents are right to emphasize the climate of fear that such restrictions can create. In another incident in Monrovia, two men in an unmarked car followed two teenage girls who were walking to a store. Fearing for their safety, the girls started walking faster. The car stopped, and the men approached the terrified girls on foot. The men turned out to be plain-clothes officers. Not only were the girls scared witless, but their parents raised another concern: Couldn't criminals prey on their children by pretending to be police officers taking them in for curfew violations?

The curfew policy hasn't just increased parental worries. It's increased parental expenses. A minor could have to go to court to prove he has an exemption. And if he loses, the penalties can be stiff. Under Dallas' ordinance, kids and parents can be fined up to $500. In other cities, officials can force teens into counseling or their parents into parenting classes, suspend kids' driver's licenses, or sentence kids to community service work. In California alone, 21,200 young people were arrested for curfew violations in 1996. That's up from 5,400 in 1989.

In January, the Los Angeles County Superior Court struck down Monrovia's daytime curfew, arguing that it contradicted the state truancy law. That decision and the controversy surrounding it have dissuaded some other cities in the area from imposing similar ordinances. But now Monrovia has put a revised ordinance on the books, and in the rest of the country, the fight is raging on. Some legislators are even thinking of following Hawaii's lead, and imposing statewide curfews.

Governments have been imposing curfews for centuries, and not just against teenagers. In the antebellum South, they regulated what times slaves and free blacks could be on the streets. They've also been implemented during times of emergency - during World War II, for instance. America's first wave of juvenile curfew laws took hold in the late 19th century.

What's new is the nostrum's renewed popularity with politicians - and citizens' increased willingness to challenge the curfews in court. A number of lawsuits, often filed with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, are pending. The most famous is in Washington, D.C., where a law keeps people under 17 at home from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. on weeknights and from midnight to 6 a.m. on weekends. The plaintiffs have related a series of horror stories about the Washington ordinance. A 17-year-old member of two musical bands said his town's curfew kept him from participating in evening performances. A 15-year-old competitive swimmer noted that he has to leave his house at 4:45 a.m. - while the curfew is in effect - to practice with his team. A 16-year-old complained about being unable to participate in informal study groups after curfew hours. A 14-year-old was upset that he couldn't engage, legally, in a number of social activities, such as stopping to get something to eat after a debate tournament, going to the opera with his 18-year-old sister, and watching late-night movies with his friends. (The last teenager's mother has also joined the lawsuit, arguing that it's her responsibility to set his hours, not the government's.)