There is no argument to give for stripping away the fundamental rights of Americans, and the only reason this law has not been stopped already is because the people it affects don't have a vote they can voice. The NAACP and the Women's Rights Movement are constantly fighting for their rights against discrimination, but teenagers don't have that choice, and worse yet, most of them don't know they are even being discriminated against. You as Congressmen and women should know better than anyone that these laws clearly violate the very doctrine you run our country by. .
It seems odd to expect that the teenagers on the streets committing crimes are going to shudder in their sneakers when they hear about a state-mandated curfew. Can you really expect teenagers caught up in crime to pay notice to a "bedtime"? The answer is more than clear; these curfew laws do not even affect the group they were designed for. So whom does it affect? The innocent, law-abiding teenagers are the victims here; the "good" kids who respect their parents and don't cause trouble in school. It's not just that curfew laws don't help the situation, they actually worsen it. By punishing the law-abiding teenagers and giving them a criminal record, they are actually pushing them towards a life of crime. If they already think they are criminals, what's to stop them from continuing? Statistics show that the "rates of serious crime among youths are strongly correlated with those of adults around them, both by local area and over time," (Macallair and Males). Therefore, it is foolish to think that every teenager out on the street past 11 or 12 o"clock is a criminal or deserving of suspicion.
The police force is a valuable organization within our society. The burden of protecting our streets is a heavy one. Curfew laws only add more weight to that burden. Rather than fighting crime and making our streets safer, they must baby-sit our teenagers.
