This essay is about age-based curfew laws, a proposal that they should be abolished. I even unleashed the full power of Mike Males (who is, as you may know, a sociologist) and his coauthored study on the effectiveness in age-based curfews. Also doubleplusungood.

Age-based curfew laws in the United States should be abolished.

There is no question that the intent of curfews—to reduce crime and protect potential victims of crime—is a noble one, but there is serious evidence that curfew laws are largely ineffective, even counterproductive, in fulfilling this goal. In addition, enforcement of curfews often disproportionately targets people in poorer areas and minorities. Curfew laws also set a dangerous precedent for government involvement in the lives of private citizens and their families.

One possible perspective on curfew laws is their effects on the rights of young people and their families. Teenagers and young children are recognized as citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (Constitution) Although freedom of mobility is not explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution, the fact that that freedom is restricted through incarceration for people convicted of crimes indicates that it is a freedom generally recognized by society, and the Ninth Amendment (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”) has been used to guarantee other rights not written out in the Constitution, such as the right to privacy and the right to non-verbal symbolic expression. This right to free mobility is denied to young people by curfew laws, even when their maturity, life experience, size, and all other relevant factors are such that their age warrants no special treatment, as is the case for seventeen-year-olds the day before their eighteenth birthday, for example. It seems it would be difficult to justify arresting young people merely for being in public at certain times as a fulfillment of the constitutional mandate to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Another right traditionally recognized by common law and the courts is the right to parent children without needless governmental intrusion, especially when this parenting is both done by a fit parent and in the best interests of the teenager or child in question. Usually when there is a conflict with these parents’ rights, youth rights, and government, the conflict is between the parents and the youth; but when the parents and the young person are in agreement, the government’s only justification for intervening is when a truly criminal act is involved. It is one thing if the government steps in because the parent is allowing the young person to steal, for example, or perhaps do drugs, but the parent’s choice to allow the young person to be in public at certain times of the day is hardly a reason to abrogate parental rights.

Another perspective on the constitutionality of age-based curfew laws is to view the Constitution and its amendments as documents whose primary purpose is not to delineate the rights granted to citizens, but to detail in what situations and in what ways the government may exercise its power, particularly to limit how the government may intervene when citizens are exercising natural, not government-given, rights (“life, liberty, and property”). Seen in this light, the danger of curfew laws is that they set a disturbing precedent for the use—and abuse—of government authority. If the government has so much power that it can arrest people for the crime of being out at certain times of day, that it can arbitrarily deprive an entire segment of the population of the ability to legally walk down the sidewalk without a conviction or trial or hearing or even a charge of criminality, what power doesn’t the government have? If the government can literally place an entire group of people under house (or school) arrest without due process of law on the assumption that if any member of that group is not in some institution or under the supervision of parent or state, even with parental permission, that parent must be “up to no good,” what can the government not do?
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