Issue: 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. The vast majority of
missing children are not abducted. Whether abducted or not, 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) for
non-criminal purposes.
All of the programs are voluntary. In some cases the police departments
retain the records, while in others the fingerprint cards are turned 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 shouldn't 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 don't.
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 child's safety. How does it improve children's safety
to be fingerprinted? Surely, it may help identify a body, but that is not much
help. Besides, dental records do the same thing and probably do a better job.
People forget that this program is geared to eventually entering the child's
identification data into the National Crime Information Center. That is a
criminal records databank, and it 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 is not 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 can't 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
New York Times reporter, "Unless you're planning a life of crime for your child,
I can't 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 of incest or abuse, the offendor 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 to
having this kind of record kept?
REFERENCES:
Fingerprinting of Children Spreading, New York Times,
February 22, 1983
Fingerprinting the Kids Won't Solve the Problem, The Fairfax
Journal (editorial), April 15, 1983, p.A6
Reston Kids Ink Up for Fingerprints, Adrian Higgins, The
Fairfax Journal, September 19, 1983, p.A1
Jersey County Fingerprints Pupils, Franklin Whitehouse, The
New York Times, January 26, 1983, p.B1
Alexandria Cops To Fingerprint School Kids, Joe O'Neill, The
Fairfax Journal, February 23, 1983, p.A4
Child Abductions A Rising Concern, Associated Press, The New
York Times, December 5, 1983
Finding Missing Children, The Washington Post (editorial),
May 28, 1982
(Note: Please leave your thoughts -- message or uploaded comments -- on this
issue on Tom Mack's RBBS, The Second Ring --- (703) 759-5049. Please address
them to Terry Steichen of New Perspectives Group, Ltd.)
