Curfews

Curfews are rules or laws that require people to remain indoors within a certain span of hours; these hours are almost always at night. Curfews are often temporarily imposed in times of disaster, riot, or emergency to reduce looting, accidents, and sabotage and to keep roads clear for emergency vehicles or the military. During the Middle Ages, daily curfews were enforced between the hours of sunset and sunrise and were announced by the tolling of church bells. At the sound of the bell, the city gates were locked, fires were extinguished, and citizens were expected to be in or close to their homes. A primary purpose of this practice was to prevent fires in the largely wooden, congested housing of the typical medieval city or town. However, the curfew also functioned to prevent drunken brawls in taverns and inns and to save local nobles the expense and trouble of law enforcement. Curfews also limited the movement and activities of certain denigrated classes of people, such as Jews and Gypsies (Roma).

During the period of slavery in the United States, all African Americans, slave or free, were required to have passes or manumission papers whenever off the plantation, especially at night. These curfews were rigorously enforced by “patrollers,” who were generally local slaveholders, their political allies, and free employees.

More recently, curfews have been imposed on youth in order to keep them off the streets and, by extension, to keep the streets safe. The argument behind these restrictions is that they prevent youth crime and victimization. This appeals to common-sense thinking about parents assuming more responsibility for young people's actions and behavior and the idea that young people really have no legitimate business being out and about beyond school, work, and normal recreational hours. The state, then, has assumed the obligation to define and dictate what constitutes normal hours for young people's comings and goings. Stringent driver's license regulations that restrict the hours during which young people can drive constitute yet another form of state intervention in the lives of young people, as they indirectly impose a curfew (and were intended to do so by state legislatures). It should be noted that many in the minority community tend to view curfews as poorly disguised attempts at controlling their youth. Libertarians see such laws as enforcing a dubious strategy of social control at the expense of individual freedom. Since such laws generally do not work, criminologists have been highly critical of them and the complacency that they produce.

Curfew laws were first widely applied to American youth in the 1890s. Before that period, many youths were expected to work long hours and were on the street at all hours going to and from various workplaces. As the workplace changed and child labor laws came into being, redundant youth thronged the streets, and the problem of gangs and controlling them came to the fore. Curfews became popular as a way to regulate young, aggressive males and to keep young girls from being “ruined” by questionable associations. The hope was that curfews would help parents regain control of their offspring. As concerns with ungovernable youth escalated during the 1950s, the popularity of curfews grew. Today, as many as 75 percent of American cities have curfew laws, and law enforcement sees them as self-evidently useful tools.

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