Curfew
Last week, the ‘Committee on Combating Organized Crime and Corruption’ announced it wants the Verkhovna Rada to introduce acurfewfor under age children. For children under 16 years of age, the curfew would start at 22:00 p.m. during the academic year, and at 23:00 p.m. during vacations. Parents would be fined if their children were caught after the start of this curfew.
My first reaction when reading this news, was one of mild disapproval, wondering whether this really is something that should be regulated by the state. However, given it is not wise to make a decision before knowing the facts, and decision making should be evidence based, I decided to look for some evidence about the need for and the effectiveness of such curfew.
Is there a need for such curfew? Data from UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre, show that compared to other Central and Eastern European Countries, Ukraine’s juvenile crime rate is not that high, nor is the juvenile sentencing rate. The data, which cover the period 1990-2006, do show a rise over time though, which gives some reason for concern.
But are curfews effective? This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case as juveniles could simply commit crimes during the daytime rather than after the curfew, or those juveniles committing crimes could continue to commit crimes despite the curfew. A recent study by Patrick Kline of the University of California, Berkeley however finds that curfews are somewhat effective in reducing crime. Using US data (in the early nineties curfews became a popular policy among US cities), he finds that in the year after the enactment of a curfew, violent and property crimes by juveniles whose age was below the curfew age, dropped by about 10% and, that for violent crimes, this effect even became larger in subsequent years.
Curfews do not only affect crime rates, they also affect academic achievement. Marco Cosconati of the University of Pennsylvania finds that imposing a state curfew would increase the Math test scores of most children. However, the smartest children are found to be negatively affected because, in the absence of a state curfew, parents can reward children for good results, by relaxing the parental curfew. A state curfew thus takes away one possible incentive parents can use to stimulate their children to study harder.
This last study thus illustrates the drawbacks of a state curfew – a state curfew restricts everybody, even those youngsters who do not need to be restricted. This suggests that rather than an overall curfew one should be looking at more targeted mechanisms – rather than having a country-wide curfew, one could allow those cities where juvenile crime is an important problem to have curfews in specific neighborhoods. Or why not have a curfew only for those kids who have bad grades? Such targeted approach to curfews is important - indeed, pushing the idea of curfews a bit further, one could easily suggest to extend curfew laws from juveniles to adults – if curfews for juveniles can decrease juvenile crime, why wouldn’t curfews for adults reduce adult crime?