E-Matura | Reading | Short answer | B2 | Curfew or Salsa

Read the text about whether curfews (deadlines by which teenagers have to be home by law) are a useful measure. Complete the sentences (1-6) using a maximum of 4 words. Write your answers in the spaces provided on the answer sheet. The first one (0) has been done for you.

Curfew or Salsa?

[…] In this mostly Hispanic neighbourhood known for gangs and poverty, over 200 students are participating in free after-school activities provided by Good Shepherd Services, a charity that helps vulnerable youths in the Bronx and Brooklyn. “We’re having fun,” says Samira, a “Salsa Scholar” on break from the cha cha.

By staying in school until after 5pm, these children are also staying out of trouble. Violent crime by or against young people peaks between 3pm and 4pm on school days, according to national FBI statistics. By 10pm, when adults commit most crimes, young people are half as deviant as they are at 3pm. Nearly a fifth of all crimes involving young people take place between 3pm and 7pm on weekdays.

Cities nervous about juvenile crime often introduce a mandatory curfew to keep kids off the street between 10pm and 6am. A new juvenile curfew in Paulsboro, New Jersey, punishes violators with fines of up to $1,000. Baltimore introduced one of the strictest curfews last year. Yet there is little evidence that curfews reduce crime. In Denver, Colorado, for example, where police punish teens who stay out late, “most juvenile crime occurs after school, not late at night,” admits Commander Matthew Murray of the Denver Police Department. Nationally the rate of juvenile violence in the hours after school is five times that in the standard curfew period.

Mandatory ones can be costly to enforce, says Michael Males of the Centre on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, an advocacy group. In Philadelphia, for example, where a strict curfew keeps teens under 18 off the street by 10.30pm on weeknights, curfew and loitering stops made up around 70% of all juvenile arrests, according to the most recent FBI statistics. Officers also appear to enforce curfews unevenly. In 2011 young African-Americans were 269% more likely to be arrested for violating curfew laws than their white peers, says the Sentencing Project, another advocacy group.

Analysts reckon that after-school programmes are a better way to keep youths in order. A study from the University of California at Los Angeles assessing the performance of LA’s BEST, a programme that serves 28,000 students across Los Angeles, found that regular participants were less likely to commit crimes, even years later.

Advocates claim that after-school programmes produce other benefits, from improving student behaviour to encouraging better attendance at school. But here the evidence is more mixed, according to a review of existing research published recently in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Some do indeed raise grades and enhance student performance, but programmes vary greatly in quality and are rarely informed by rigorous studies about what works best.

Still, parents want more of them. Around 10.2m students took part in after-school programmes around the country in 2014, but this number would nearly triple if supply met demand, claims the Afterschool Alliance, a lobby group. “We’re over-enrolled, but we make it work,” says Chante Brown, the programme director at Creston. “Because if they’re not in this building, forget about it.”

Complete the sentences (1-6) using a maximum of 4 words. Write your answers in the spaces provided on the answer sheet. The first one (0) has been done for you.