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parents voluntarily Fingerprinting Kids Should parents voluntarily create detailed identification records (including fingerprints) on their children in anticipation of possible runaway problems or abductions? (1) Yes. You can never tell when terrible things will happen to a child, so its best to be prepared. (2) No. Thevast majority of missing children are not abducted. Whether abducted orbit, fingerprinting will do no good. It wastes time and money and pushes us that much closer to the creation of the Orwellian National Data Center that Congress rejected fifteen years ago. BACKGROUND: As of early 1983, 11 states had launched programs to fingerprint children. (These were New York, Virginia, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Kansas, Illinois, and Indiana. ) Most of this activity was stimulated by the passage of the Missing Children Act in October 1982.
What the new law did was to legitimize the use of the Fbi's national computer network, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) forgot-criminal purposes. All of the programs are voluntary. In some cases the police departments retain the records, while in others the fingerprint cards a returned over to the parents for safekeeping. The apparent purpose of the program is to help provide positive identification to link either children picked up, or bodies recovered, with missing person notices. Every year about 1 million children are reported missing. Of these most, about 800, 000, are away from home for less than two weeks.
About 150, 000 of the total missing are abducted; of these two thirds are abducted by a divorced parent. Some of the reasons behind the missing children are not pretty. According to an article in Parade, " about 35 percent of runaways leave home because of incest, 53 percent because of physical neglect. The rest are" throwaways, " children kicked out or simply abandoned by parents who move away. Every state has laws against incest, child abuse, abandonment, child pornography and the procuring of children, but they are rarely enforced. " POINT: Conscientious parents should have their childrens fingerprints recorded to help in the event of an abduction; they shouldnt wait until after something terrible happens, but should take reasonable steps now. Thousands of children are runaways, and in many cases it is all but impossible to determine clearly who they really are.
People change, but fingerprints dont. Well-intentioned but misguided civil libertarians worry about Big Brother. But they tend to overlook the obvious benefits of the program and concentrate on wildly imaginative fantasies about Big Brother. If they would come down to earth once in a while, and visit with and share the anguish of a family of an abducted child, they would quickly change their attitudes. Besides, in most cases the police do not keep the records, the parents do. COUNTERPOINT: Absent some showing that the fingerprinting will actually help keep children safe and help capture criminals who harm or abduct them, parents should refuse to have their children fingerprinted.
In promoting the child fingerprinting program, police officials tend to be vague about how the program will increase the average childs safety. How does it improve childrens safety to be fingerprinted? Surely, it may help identify a body, but that is not much help. Besides, dental records do these thing and probably do a better job.
People forget that this program is geared to eventually entering the childs identification data into the National Crime Information Center. That is a criminal records databank, and could be very harmful to a child in the future to have what many employers will automatically take to be a " criminal record. " And that int far fetched. In April 1983 the Congress General Accounting Office released a report saying that in some states children picked up as runaways are jailed along with real criminals. GAO found that in five states (Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Oregon) 39 percent of the juveniles incarcerated had not been charged with a serious offense, despite federal standards requiring that. Running away from home, shoplifting and other minor thefts made up most of the offenses.
Even advocates admit to the possibility of a stigma. A PTA Council President in Virginia spoke out in favor of the program: " I cant think at this point of a practical reason for not having your fingerprints taken. It seems to me the higher the percentage of the population that has its fingerprints on file, the less stigma will be attached to it. " Another mother, as her child was being fingerprinted, told a NewYork Times reporter, " Unless youre planning a life of crime for your child, I cant see why any parent would object. " If we are really serious about reducing the runaway problem, we should demand that our police officials start looking closely into the family situations from which the runaway came from. If there is evidence incest or abuse, the offender should be prosecuted. Maybe if more abusive parents got that message, they would be less inclined to do the things that cause the vast majority of runaway cases in the first place.
QUESTIONS: o Do you think that the police will be more effective in locating missing children if there are copies of their fingerprints on record? o Do you think that there is any problem with having your own records stored in a criminal record computer system? Would anyone assume from such records that you have done something wrong? o If a child runs away from home because of incest or physical abuse, should the police help put him back in that home? o Do you think that the voluntary fingerprinting program will make the next generation of American citizens less reluctant to let government keep more records on them?
Or will it have the opposite effect and make people used having this kind of record kept? REFERENCES: Fingerprinting of Children Spreading, New York Times, February 22, 1983 Fingerprinting the Kids Wont Solve the Problem, The Fairfax Journal (editorial), April 15, 1983, p. A 6 Reston Kids Ink Up for Fingerprints, Adrian Higgins, The Fairfax Journal, September 19, 1983, p. A 1 Jersey County Fingerprints Pupils, Franklin Whitehouse, The New York Times, January 26, 1983, p. B 1 Alexandria Cops To Fingerprint School Kids, Joe ONeill, The Fairfax Journal, February 23, 1983, p.
A 4 Child Abductions A Rising Concern, Associated Press, The NewYork Times, December 5, 1983 Finding Missing Children, The Washington Post (editorial), May 28, 1982 32 d
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