According to Janet Reitman's article titled "Fight For Your Rights: Curfews for Kids" published by Scholastic, Inc. in 1998, Tiana Hutchins is a 16-year-old girl years old from Washington, D.C. was chatting with his friends on a neighborhood street corner after 11 p.m. It had never occurred to Tiana that chatting with her friends on a street corner was a crime. That is until a Washington, D.C., police officer ordered her to come inside or face arrest for violating Washington's curfew law. This law prohibits anyone under the age of 17 from being in a public place after 11pm on weekdays. Tiana says, "It's unfair to punish good kids who try to make something of themselves when only a small percentage of young people commit crimes in the city during curfew hours." Unfortunately there are many similar curfew laws to this extent throughout the United States. According to Martin Morse Wooster in his article titled "Be Nice to Policemen" published by the American Enterprise Institute in July 1999, approximately 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 Current curfew laws are outdated, have inadequate causes, and have no statistical correlations between young adults and illegal behavior. Banning harmless behavior to prevent crime has long been the status quo, especially for young people, despite the uncertain evidence of its effectiveness. Many times people assume obvious correlations between youth behavior and social problems and remove their constitutional rights with little, if any, evidence of its necessity. The most obvious example of this is the use of curfew laws, which have been challenged on a variety of constitutional grounds. Regardless of their immense use acro... middle of paper... link between curfew laws and school shootings. Observing the rapid increase in juvenile crime may simply mean greater attention to it. Despite the enormous amount of expert evidence supporting curfew laws, there is no experiential evidence that curfew laws actually work. If Mike Males and Dan Macallair are biased in their study, then why are law enforcement, or any other institution, completely reluctant to examine their study and conduct similar experimental studies? The appropriate response to crime, including juvenile crime, is to arrest people 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 youth curfew laws, after decades of enforcement, then there is no “compelling state interest” necessary to deny young people their constitutional rights..