During the “new business” portion of Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Mayor Ardis distributed a memo to all the council members that said:
I am attaching a communication that I sent to the previous council this past spring with a few examples of Parental Responsibility Ordinances being used in other cities. l would like to entertain a discussion on the need for a similar ordinance in Peoria sometime in August.
Attached to the memo were copies of ordinances from five other communities: Des Plaines, IL; Grand Rapids, MI; Royal Oak, MI; Silverton, OR; and Cincinnati, OH (repealed 2002). The council will discuss this topic at the August 28 council meeting.
Rarely Enforced
It’s not surprising that this would come up again right after an unsupervised 15-year-old threw a stone off an I-74 overpass, killing the passenger of a passing car. But how effective are these laws? According to “An Empirical Study of Parental Responsibility Laws” published just last year in the Utah Law Review, not very.
University of Oregon School of Law professor Leslie Joan Harris surveyed every police chief and prosecutor in the state of Oregon and found that “the responses to the questionnaires showed overwhelmingly that parental responsibility laws are rarely, if ever, enforced in most places.” Instead, she finds that they are generally symbolic, “enacted to articulate community values about proper parenting and to induce ‘bad’ parents to reform.” However, such laws do increase the probability that curfew laws will be more stringently enforced. She concludes (emphasis added):
Finally, parental responsibility laws define youth crime as a private problem born of familial failure rather than behavior that, at low levels, is a usual part of the maturation process and, at higher levels, may call for collective efforts to engage teenagers in positive ways, including helping parents in difficult situations. The laws provide politicians with a cheap and easy way of avoiding meaningful efforts to address significant social issues.
I’d recommend reading the whole report as it’s very interesting; it includes a brief history of parental responsibility laws over the last hundred years. It’s interesting to note that these findings are consistent with Jennifer Davis’s report in the Journal Star today. Davis has been calling the communities listed in the Mayor’s memorandum and has so far found that their ordinances are rarely, if ever, enforced as well.
Likely Unconstitutional
But there’s a bigger problem on the horizon for parental responsibility laws. On June 29, 2007, a municipal judge in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, ruled that the city of Maple Heights’s parental responsibility law is unconstitutionalbecause it violates the due process clause of the fourth amendment. (All legal documents related to this ruling are available here. Here’s a PDF version of the ruling.)
Maple Heights’s ordinance was patterned after the one in Silverton, Oregon (which is one of the ordinances being reviewed by Peoria as a possible template as well), and reads in part:
(a) A person commits the offense of failing to supervise a minor if: the person is the parent, legal guardian, or person with legal responsibility for the safety and welfare of a child under 18 years of age, and the child has committed a status offense, unruly act or a delinquent act that would be a misdemeanor or felony of any degree if committed by an adult.
(b) It shall be a defense to the offense of failure to supervise a minor if the person took reasonable steps to control the conduct of the child at the time the person is alleged to have failed to supervise.
Judge Jennifer P. Weiler explains why this does not stand constitutional muster. “The due process clause of the United States Constitution requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt of every fact necessary to constitute the offense charged.” In other words, a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty — the burden of proof is on the accuser. Weiler continues:
The substance of the Maple Heights offense is the failure to supervise a minor. However, the ordinance presumes a violation where a parent has a child who has committed an offense. It is up to the parent to demonstrate that reasonable steps were taken to control the child’s conduct. As such, it is the accused’s burden to demonstrate there was no failure to supervise. This contravenes…the due process requirements….
The ordinance also failed on two other due-process counts. Nevertheless, the City of Maple Heights filed their notice of appeal last Friday, July 20 says Blake Ledbetter of Conoscienti & Ledbetter in Atlanta, Georgia. This isn’t to say that an ordinance couldn’t be crafted that would be consistent with the constitution, but it does reveal that existing ordinances haven’t yet been adequately tested in court.
Just for the record, when I started researching this I was in favor of a parental responsibility ordinance for Peoria. I came to this topic predisposed to look for positive evidence of its efficacy. However, considering the unlikelihood of enforcement, and the questionable constitutionality of such laws, I’m now inclined to think that this is probably not a very effective tool to combat juvenile crime in Peoria.
For government to insist on more parental responsibility of their children’s actions while at the same time restricting more n more what a parent can do to ensure their child’s proper behavior is a prescription for failure.
I am a believer that if you have delinquent child in Junior High or High School, your task of correcting that behavior significantly more difficult to near impossible to correct. The foundation for that behavior was laid in grade school. Punishing parents at that later age is a bit of a johnny come lately to the problem. The problem began years earlier.
I can’t say I am too keen on the whole parental responsibility law movement. At some point the child has to take responsibility for their actions and society needs to recognize that. I have a 10 year old son at home who sometimes I leave alone for 30 minutes to an hour at a time. He is responsible enough for that. Yet in that short amount of time he could conceivably grab a brick and toss it at a passing car. The idea that I might have to go to jail for that is absurd to outragious. Would I expect to have to pay for the damages, sure, probably. That is why I have insurance. Would my kid suffer consequences? You bet.
There is a limit on what parents can or should be expected to do when it comes to adolescent children. Should I have to be supervising my 10 year old every minute of the day like I do my 10 month old? No but sometimes when I read about those wanting parental responsibility laws, I get the impression that is exactly what they want. These kids are not toddlers.
What can a parent do? Ground them? They get up an leave. Deny them an allowance? They might steal from you or others. Evict them? DCFS will come a knocking. Physically restrain them or ‘spank’ them? Child abuse.
Be careful what you ask for. All kids do something stupid at some point. Is it really fair to punish someone else for it?
As I said on Billy’s blog, I dislike these ordinances for a couple of reasons: First, the best parent in the world can have a “bad” kid and shouldn’t be racking up a string of misdemeanor convictions that could impact their employability just because their kid is a “bad seed.” And second, the ones that call for jail time are moronic: “You’re doing a bad job supervising child #3, so we’re going to put you in prison so you can’t supervise ANY of your four children!”
In my experience growing up, laws were rarely enforced when teenagers committed the infraction. And when they were, parents had super meltdowns — partly because “sealed” juvenile records rarely are actually “sealed” today (partly because of the persistence of press reports b/c of google). I would rather see laws actually enforced at teenagers and with stringent penalties attached. Better onerous hours of community service now than escalation to more serious crimes later. And to do that, I’d like to see incentives for parents to cooperate with the courts. Make expungement easily available when parents cooperate with punishing the child through the court system. Strike a deal with local press that first-time minor-crime juvenile offenders whose parents are cooperating will not be named in the press (this is not unusual in other juvenile court proceedings) so it won’t turn up on google.
Newsweek has a little blurb on this, in the July 16th print issue.
They listed some offenses and consequences:
In Portland Oregon, parents can be fined $1000 for their kids violating curfew.
In Missouri if your kid is a thief, the parents are liable for restitution, damages AND up to $4000 in fines.
In California, if your kid lays the smack down on the playground, hurting another kid, the parents are liable for damages to the victim and up to $10,000 in fines.
In Louisiana, if your kid joins a gang, you can face jail time, community service, AND up $250 in fines.
In Arkansas, if your kid is a vandal, you are liable for the damages and fines up to $15,000. That would be one expensive window !!
In Florida, your child’s truancy is punishable with up to 6 months in jail AND fines up to $500. Yeah locking mom n dad up is going to do a lot of good at keeping a kid in school….
More fluff to avoid dealing with the issues at hand….