Kids Fingerprints

4 Pages 1071 Words

Kid fingerprinting

Should parents voluntarily create detailed identification records (including fingerprints) on their children? Do to anticipation of possible runaway problems or abductions? Some agree because you can never tell when terrible things will happen to a child, so it is best to be prepared. Nevertheless, some disagree due to the vast majority of missing children that are not abducted. Whether abducted or not, fingerprinting will do no good they say. 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.
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; now all states participate. 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, or the fingerprint cards are turned over to the parents for safekeeping. The apparent purpose of the program is to help provide either positive identification to link 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 sim...