There are two basic types of curfews: of which the most pertinent one is a curfew set for emergency reasons in regards to a real public safety issue because of a natural disaster or rioting or similar, than there is the other type of curfew which is at the convenience of the State, arbitrary, and basically takes those that are under eighteen and imposes a curfew upon them, which based on the day of the week, and the time of the actual curfew, may be perceived as reasonable or not. The thing about curfews in general is that the Supreme Court had this to say:”the right to walk the streets, or to meet publicly with one's friends for a noble purpose or for no purpose at all—and to do so whenever one pleases—is an integral component of life in a free and ordered society." However, when it comes to juveniles, the Supreme Court has permitted exceptions to this basic rule that the public is allowed to walk the streets freely, and then when it comes to private property, in particular, certain shopping malls, private property rights muddies the curfew waters even more.
You might think that shopping malls would be interested in as much foot traffic as possible in order to conduct their day-to-day business, but that isn't really true at all. In fact, a significant amount of shopping malls are particular about who shops their malls, and whereas, you might suspect that the shopping mall philosophy would be that youth must be served, above all, that isn't the case in all shopping malls. Instead, certain shopping malls have enacted specific rules mandating that juveniles must be escorted by a parental authority after 6PM, for instance, and that those that disobey such authority will be in violation of curfew, and subsequently it is within the rights of the mall to escort such juveniles off of the property.
There are many issues with this type of curfew, of which, one is the fact that juveniles, being juveniles, often wish to congregate amongst themselves, rather than being with their parents at all times, and parents as well, do not want to be with their children at all times. An additional issue is that certain shopping malls have movie theatres and because the movie theatre is on mall premises, this means, that parents cannot drop their children off to the movie theatre, after 6PM or engage a showing which will end after 6PM, which is hardly beneficial for the movie theatre or for the biggest patrons of movies in general, which is young people. Further, to the point, and in reality the elephant in the room, is the fact that despite the fact that the mall may already have certain dress codes, behavior codes, along with specific rules that deal with gang paraphernalia and gang colors, the mall, because of fear of lawsuits or whatever, theoretically groups all juveniles under one umbrella, rather than dealing with the element that they believe is disruptive and thereby bad for business.
As bad as that is for juveniles, incredibly, at the present time the Atlantic Station mall of Atlanta, GA, has an even more insidious and quite debatable further curfew for those that are under the age of twenty-one but at least eighteen years old, in which their curfew at the property is 11PM, even though restaurants and the movie theatre are all open later than 11PM. The above, is a prime example of how someone that is legally an adult, is still treated as if they are something other than an adult, and is ultimately of dubious legality.
For those that believe that private establishments should be allowed to set the rules of their particular establishment and thereby to treat their patrons in the manner that they best see fit, this type of mindset, that the business owner can do whatever that he desires with his property, was essentially nullified by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, so that private establishments could no longer discriminate against patrons on the basis of their race or similar. Today, with these shopping mall rules,
juveniles as well as adults less than the age of twenty-one are discriminated against, to which, underneath the surface there is a more than a distinct feeling that these laws are primarily enacted to treat certain specified people, separately and unequally.