Abilene Needs A Curfew For Adults

It was a sad story, as they all are. Abilene’s latest murder involved the death of a 19-year old man allegedly at the hand of a 16-year old boy. Details were sketchy, but apparently at happened at a north Abilene home in the early morning hours of Saturday, April 18th. There was a fight and a shooting.
That prompted an online poll this week on BigCountryHomePage.Com: “Would a teen curfew lower crime?” The results were a little one sided, as you might expect. Only 64 people responded, so it was far from a communbity mandate, but almost 80% said, "Yes, a curfew would keep teens out of trouble".
But wait just a minute here. While it’s true, crimes involving teens tend to get huge headlines, in my 33 years of covering news, the crimes committed by adults far outweigh those committed by kids. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas released a report on prisons. Entitled Texas: Tougher than Ever, But are we Safer?, the report found that in 2005, Texas' non-violent prison population totaled 57,460 inmates, making ours the 6th largest prison system in the nation. One of the findings was that Texas spent five times as much on its prison system as it did on higher education (and couldn't figure out why it was having a problem with repeat offenders)– and taxpayers were picking up most of the cost of incarceration. Then, in March of 2007, the lid blew off conditions in juvenile lock-ups in Texas far worse than any adult jail in the state.
No, I think that if you really want to attack the problem of crime, let’s put the biggest offenders away: the adults. But more than that, let’s impose a curfew for the rest of them, whether they’ve done anything wrong or not. No adults on the streets after 11 at night. Violators will be arrested on sight and locked up. That should reduce the crime rate because the only adults out after 11 would be criminals, right?
So, how do you like the sound of that? Doesn’t sit too well, does it? Especially if you are being unfairly judged, based on the actions of a few individuals.
I know that a lot of cities in Texas have a teen curfew. Abilene is not one of them. You know, I have a real problem with this continuing cycle of “criminalizing” our kids. We don’t want them to smoke, so we make it a crime to do so. We want to protect them from skin cancer, so we pass a bill outlawing tanning beds if the user is younger than 16. Want to talk about skin cancer, how about this: I know of kids who spent their summer's in backyard or at the neighborhood pool, smothered in baby oil or cooking oil. Instead of keeping the tanning in a regulated environment, we just turn them loose to bake like a strip of bacon.
When I was growing up, my parents had a rule: I had to be home by 10. During the summer, I was allowed to sit on the front porch with my friends until 11, but I couldn’t leave the porch. Did our city have a curfew? I don’t know; it never came up. I had a curfew, though, and if I didn’t follow it, I didn’t go to jail. I didn’t go anywhere…for a month!
There are 292 cities in the country that restrict teenagers after hours. Most have a curfew in place from eleven at night until sunrise the next morning. My first real job was delivering the Washington Post everyday, rain or shine. It meant getting up early each morning, sometimes before five, so that adults could have their morning paper each day. I had to service my paper route and collect from my customers each month to pay for my papers. Sometimes, I got stiffed by them. It taught me a lot about people.
You know, maybe it’s time for parents to stop letting the government step in and do their jobs.
Would a teen curfew curb crime? Maybe, but an adult curfew would make an even bigger impact. In fact, here’s an idea: let’s ban everyone from being on the streets between 11 pm and sunrise. That’s a deterrent. It’s also got a name: martial law.

Downing Bolls