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Date: November 25, 2024 Mon
Time: 8:01 pm
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Results for juvenile curfews
3 results foundAuthor: Sapp, David Title: Counterproductive and Wasteful: Los Angeles' Daytime Curfew Pushes Students Away From School Summary: In 1995, the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance establishing a daytime curfew for the city's youth. Promulgated as Los Angeles Municipal Code (LAMC) 45.04, the law as currently written makes it unlawful, with limited exceptions, for any youth under the age of 18 to be in a public place during hours of the day when the youth's school is in session. Between 2005 and 2009, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Los Angeles School Police Department (LASPD) issued more than 47,000 tickets under the ordinance. This report - based on a review of scientific research, interviews with and surveys of thousands of students, and data obtained from LAPD, LASPD, and other public agencies - argues that LAMC 45.04 is a fundamentally misguided policy. The curfew, which has increasingly been used as an enforcement tool to improve student attendance, in fact causes students to miss school. The curfew's economic burdens - which include hefty fines, missed days of school to attend court hearings, and lost earnings by parents who must accompany their children to court - fall most heavily on low-income communities and families that are least able to afford them. And the law has been applied in a manner that disproportionately affects black and Latino youth, who have been issued curfew citations under LAMC 45.04 in numbers that far exceed their percentage of the population - a fact which, among others, exposes the city and other agencies to legal liability. Moreover, substantial research shows that curfew laws are ineffective in achieving their stated purpose of reducing crime. LAMC 45.04 diverts resources away from addressing serious crime, forcing police to address student attendance matters which are properly addressed by schools and families, not the penal system. In response to a multi-year campaign by community organizations, LAPD and LASPD have agreed to modify their enforcement protocols for the daytime curfew to address some of the law's most deleterious consequences. These changes, reflected in recently issued guidance directives, represent meaningful steps forward. The law enforcement agencies with primary responsibility for enforcing the daytime curfew have demonstrated leadership by curtailing the unnecessary criminalization of youth and ensuring that their limited resources are instead focused on investigating and preventing crime. Nonetheless, serious problems remain. Among other things, the new enforcement protocols are internal guidelines and thus can be revised at any time; they leave substantial discretion to individual officers (for example officers maintain discretion to handcuff and cite students who are simply running late to school); and they do not apply to the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, which also has authority to cite students under the ordinance. The reality is that as long as LAMC 45.04 is on the books, the potential for youth to be caught up unnecessarily in the penal system remains and limited resources for addressing real crime will continue to be misallocated. As we discuss in these pages, the time has come to repeal this failed and counterproductive policy and to establish in its place a sensible and sustainable approach for ensuring that children stay in school. In place of the current approach, we encourage the City of Los Angeles to work with the many agencies within Los Angeles County with a stake in ensuring that our youth are engaged in school - school districts, county agencies such as the Department of Children and Family Services and the Probation Department, the juvenile courts, and law enforcement officials and prosecutors - to implement a research-based approach to engage students in school and to ensure that students are connected with appropriate resources if they begin to disconnect from the education system. This report concludes with recommendations for a comprehensive set of reforms drawing from evidence-based practices and research evaluating the effectiveness of various programs from around the country. Details: Los Angeles: ACLU of Southern California, 2012. 16p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 20, 2015 at: http://www.publiccounsel.org/tools/assets/files/Counterproductive-and-Wasteful-Los-Angeles-daytime-curfew-report_FINAL.pdf Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: http://www.publiccounsel.org/tools/assets/files/Counterproductive-and-Wasteful-Los-Angeles-daytime-curfew-report_FINAL.pdf Shelf Number: 135723 Keywords: Juvenile CurfewsSchool AttendanceStudentsTruants |
Author: Wilson, David B. Title: Juvenile Curfew Effects on Criminal Behavior and Victimization: A Systematic Review Summary: The evidence suggests that juvenile curfews do not reduce crime or victimization. What is this review about? Curfews restrict youth below a certain - usually 17 or 18 - from public places during nighttime. For example, the Prince George's County, Maryland, curfew ordinance restricts youth younger than 17 from public places between 10 P.M. and 5 A.M. on weekdays and between midnight and 5 A.M. on weekends. Sanctions range from a fine that increases with each offense, community service, and restrictions on a youth's driver's license. Close to three quarters of US cities have curfews, which are also used in Iceland. A juvenile curfew has common sense appeal: keep youth at home during the late night and early morning hours and you will prevent them from committing a crime or being a victim of a crime. In addition, the potential for fines or other sanctions deter youth from being out in a public place during curfew hours. Juvenile curfews have received numerous legal challenges. The constitutional basis for infringing the rights of youth rests on the assumption that they reduce juvenile crime and victimization. This review synthesizes the evidence on the effectiveness of juvenile curfews in reducing criminal behavior and victimization among youth. What are the main findings of this review? What studies are included? Included studies test the effect of an official state or local policy intended to restrict or otherwise penalize a juvenile's presence outside the home during certain times of day. This must have been a general preventive measure directed at all youth within a certain age range and not a sanction imposed on a specific youth. Twelve quantitative evaluations of the effects of curfews on youth criminal behavior or victimization are included in the review. Do curfews reduce crime and victimization? The pattern of evidence suggests that juvenile curfews are ineffective at reducing crime and victimization. The average effect on juvenile crime during curfew hours was slightly positive - that is a slight increase in crime - and close to zero for crime during all hours. Both effects were not significant. Similarly, juvenile victimization also appeared unaffected by the imposition of a curfew ordinance. However, all the studies in the review suffer from some limitations that make it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Nonetheless, the lack of any credible evidence in their favour suggests that any effect is likely to be small at best and that curfews are unlikely to be a meaningful solution to juvenile crime and disorder. Other studies have suggested curfews may be ineffective as juvenile crime is concentrated in hours before and after school, and that under-resourced police forces focus on more urgent demands than enforcing curfews. What do the results mean? Contrary to popular belief, the evidence suggests that juvenile curfews do not produce the expected benefits. The study designs used in this research make it difficult to draw clear conclusions, so more research is needed to replicate the findings. However, many of the biases likely to occur in existing studies would make it more, rather than less, likely that we would conclude curfews are effective. For example, most of these studies were conducted during a time when crime was dropping throughout the United States. Therefore, our findings suggest that either curfews don't have any effect on crime, or the effect is too small to be identified in the research available. Details: Oslo: Campbell Collaboration, 2016. 101p. Source: Internet Resource: Campbell Systematic Review 2016:03: Accessed April 7, 2016 at: http://www.campbellcollaboration.org/lib/?go=browse_issues&year=2016 Year: 2016 Country: International URL: http://www.campbellcollaboration.org/lib/?go=browse_issues&year=2016 Shelf Number: 138595 Keywords: Delinquency PreventionJuvenile CurfewsJuvenile DelinquencyVictimization |
Author: Carr, Jillian B. Title: Keep the Kids Inside? Juvenile Curfews and Urban Gun Violence Summary: Gun violence is an important problem across the United States. However, the impact of government policies on the frequency and location of gunfire has been difficult to test due to limited data. The data that do exist suffer from broad and non-random under-reporting. This paper uses a new, more accurate source of data on gunfire incidents to measure the effects of juvenile curfews in Washington, DC. Juvenile curfews are a common, but extremely controversial, policy used in cities across the United States. Their goal is to reduce violent crime by keeping would-be offenders and victims indoors, but removing bystanders and witnesses from the streets could reduce their deterrent effect on street crime. The net effect on public safety is therefore ambiguous. We use exogenous variation in the hours of the DC curfew to identify the policy's causal effect on gun violence. We find that, contrary to its goal of improving public safety, DC's juvenile curfew increases the number of gunfire incidents by 150% during marginal hours. Details: Unpublished paper, 2015. 26p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 6, 2016 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2486903 Year: 2015 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2486903 Shelf Number: 139977 Keywords: Gun ViolenceGun-Related ViolenceJuvenile CrimeJuvenile CurfewsUrban AreasViolent Crime |