The Demographic Origins of Curfew Laws: A Longitudinal Hazard Analysis

• In Event: 600 - Section on Crime, Law and Deviance Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Origins and Effects of Policies

Abstract

This study is an inquiry into the sociodemographic origins of legislative social control mechanisms. Drawing upon Blumer’s (1958) theory of group threat, this paper explores the relationship between social threat (comprised of racial and class threat) and a city’s risk of adopting a juvenile curfew ordinance. This study is based on data from the 109 cities in the United States with populations over 200,000. I operationalize racial threat as both the number and proportion of black residents in cities; class threat is operationalized as median family income adjusted to 2010 dollars. Adopted from epidemiology, I use a Cox proportional hazard model to analyze longitudinal census and crime data from 1950 through 2010. Preliminary results lend support to class threat, but not racial threat, indicating that a city’s risk of adopting a curfew ordinance decreases when cities experience a growth in the black population and increases in median family income.

Author

• Portia Allen-Kyle, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers