Teenage Curfews Essay

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Brittany Black Freshmen Composition 101 19 August 2011 Rhetorical Analysis Teenage Curfews We all have been asked the question either at a late night party or at a late night ball game, “What is your curfew?” Almost every teenager has a set curfew, but is a curfew really necessary? The issue of setting a certain curfew has always been a long debate between teenagers and their parents. In 1997, there was a national study done in 347 communities with at least a population of 30,000 people pertaining to both daytime and nighttime curfews. Of the 347 communities only 80% of them enforced a nighttime curfew and only 26% of that 80% set a daytime curfew for teenagers. In my opinion, everybody under the legal age should have a curfew because curfews are put into order to decrease juvenile crime, to decrease police suspicion among teens, and to also create a safe zone between teens and their parents along with keeping a safe zone between one’s community. Curfews are set to reduce juvenile crime and to ensure the protection of innocent beings. It is said that juvenile delinquency increases between the ages of ten and sixteen years of age. Just alone in Dallas, Texas, there has been a record of 5,425 juvenile arrests, including 40 murders, 91 sex offenders, 233 robberies, and 230 aggravated assaults. All of these crimes have occurred between the times of ten o’clock p.m. and three o’clock a.m. Because of these results, Dallas’s legal system was forced to set a state wide curfew and if you were under the age of seventeen you had a curfew every day of the week: from eleven p.m. through six p.m. Sunday through Thursday and from midnight to six a.m. Friday and Saturday. If you were underage at the time and you were caught on the roads between curfew hours, you were arrested and brought either to an adult jail or a community and recreation center where police could
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