Teen curfew is supposed to reduce teen crime at night, and it does. People overlook the statistic, that the day time crime increases. Teen curfew reduces crime at night but when teens can’t do crimes at night they do it in the day. They also don’t think about temptation, drug use, and pregnancy that can all happen in the day.


Teen curfew tries to reduce the teen crime, but what it really does is increases the crime done in the day time. So it equals out the crime and that creates no reduction of crime. Even though curfew arrests of young people in California rose from 5,400 in 1989 to 21,200 in 1996, the JPI found that there was no corresponding decrease in youth crime rates(Study). So even with the curfew, crime still stayed the same.


When they made curfew a law they thought it would reduce vandalism, teen pregnancy, and illegal drug use. They didn’t think about how bad kids will still do bad things no matter when a curfew is, it won’t stop them. The thought process behind Rochester’s law ( Curfew Law) is that where there is smoke there is fire. This idiom is stating wherever bad kids are, bad things will happen.


The bad thing about curfew is that it gives teens a temptation to break the curfew because it is in every teen to do the opposite of what people tell you to do. So when they tell us that after 12:00 we can’t go out. We think that we can make a game out of it and most teens will at some point, and most of the teens that sneak out don’t do bad things they just want to see if they get caught. A city survey was done by U.S mayors and they got some feedback from the town of Claremont. The city said that it frees up officers' time during the curfew hours to do other police work. Kids don't go out because they know they will get in trouble. This shows that the cities think that kids won’t do it because they will get in trouble, but really it is creating a temptation to sneak out which may cause them to commit a crime instead of thinking it will prevent them from making one.


The teen curfew doesn’t effect the crime rates in cities at all. In some cases it even increased the crime rate because of things like temptation. What the cities need to know is that the curfew law doesn’t help crime overall it just helps the crime at night. So if they wanted to reduce the crime overall, they should probably think of a new law that will actually make teens stop crime.