According to Janet Reitman's article "Fight for Your Rights: Curfews for Children" published by Scholastic, Inc. in 1998, Tiana Hutchins, a 16 year old girl. from Washington, DC, was chatting with his friends on a neighborhood street corner after 11 p.m. It never occurred to Tiana that chatting with her friends on a street corner was a crime. That was until a Washington, D.C., police officer ordered her to go inside or be arrested for violating Washington's curfew law. This law prohibits anyone under the age of 17 from being in a public place after 11 p.m. on weekdays. Tiana says: “It is unfair to punish good children for trying to do something when only a small percentage of young people commit crimes in the city during curfew hours.” Unfortunately, there are many similar curfew laws across the United States. According to Martin Morse Wooster in his article "Be Nice to Policemen" published by the American Enterprise Institute in July 1999, about 75 percent of the nation's 200 largest cities have curfew laws, most imposed after 1990. Current curfew laws are outdated, have inadequate causes, and have no statistical correlation between young adults and illegal behavior. Banning harmless behavior to prevent crime has long been the status qua, particularly for young people, despite uncertain evidence of its effectiveness. Often, people see obvious correlations between youth behavior and social problems and suppress their constitutional rights with little to no evidence of their necessity. The most obvious example is the use of curfew laws, which have been challenged on a number of constitutional grounds. Regardless of their immense use middle of paper...... connection between curfew laws and school shootings. The observation of rapidly increasing juvenile crime may simply be an increased focus on this topic. Despite the massive amount of expert evidence in favor of curfew laws, there is no experiential evidence of their effectiveness. If Mike Males and Dan Macallair are biased in their study, then why are law enforcement, or any other institution, completely unwilling to review their study and conduct similar experimental studies? The right response to crime, including juvenile delinquency, is to arrest those suspected of criminal behavior, not to keep millions of innocent, law-abiding young people under house arrest. If there is no definitive evidence of the effectiveness of curfew laws for youth, after decades of enforcement, then there is no "compelling state interest" necessary to deprive youth young people of their constitutional rights..