"Sweet Land of Liberty"?

We begin with a simple proposition: namely, that the measure of 'civilisation' of any society is how it treats its children. On that score, the United States of America fails miserably.

According to data from The Sentencing Project, as of 2023, the total number of youth held in juvenile detention and adult prisons across the US was 31,800, of whom 29,300 were in 'juvenile justice facilities', leaving 2,500 in adult jails. Only 8.5% of youth arrests in the US are for violent crimes, according to the FBI, defining 'violent crimes' as such things as aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder.

The Sentencing Project points to the ethnic disparities with regard to juvenile imprisonment in the US: 'In 2023, the white incarceration rate in juvenile facilities was 52 per 100,000 youth under age 18. By comparison, the Black youth incarceration rate was 293 per 100,000, 5.6 times as high. Native youth were 3.8 times as high (199 per 100,000) and Latino youth were 25% more likely (65 per 100,000). Asian American youth were the least likely to be held in juvenile facilities (14 per 100,000).'

Barnert, et al (2018) found that 'those with a history of child incarceration [in the US] were disproportionately black or Hispanic, male, and from lower socio-economic strata.' Barnert and her colleagues point out that 'The USA incarcerates more youth than any other developed country in the world. Despite the lowest youth crime rate in over 20 years, the youth incarceration rate in the USA remains approximately 7 times higher than in England and 3,000 times higher than in Japan.'

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 'By our estimation, nearly 45% of youth in confinement could likely be safely released today.' I suspect, given the high percentage of non-violent offenders amongst those who are incarcerated, that is a rather conservative estimate. Even if we accept it, however, that would reduce the (2023) youth prison population in the US from 31,800 to 17,490.

The Dallas Weekly, hardly likely to be a radical newspaper, reported in March 2022 that black and Latino youth were 50% more likely to face imprisonment that their white peers. It gave an instance of what happened when two 'kindergarteners in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, tried their best to pick a fight, throwing feeble punches at an older and much larger boy who insulted one of their mothers. Police, having seen the fight online, couldn’t determine which boys were part of these mundane events but arrested 11 other kids - all were Black and all of them in elementary school - who purportedly were there and watched the fight unfold. According to The Sentencing Project, the children, some of them in handcuffs, were brought to the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center. Authorities ran them through an undefined "filter system" that determined some needed to be locked up.'

Let us remind ourselves that elementary school pupils in the US are all either under the age of 11, or no older than 11. As the report points out, 'In Rutherford County [Tennessee], roughly half of the arrested kids are detained.' The report also points out that the children's 'alleged "action" - watching a fight and not breaking it up - isn’t a crime in Tennessee.' It would be a trivial crime indeed if it was.

As noted by the Children's Defense Fund in 2023, California's lawmakers wanted to spend $1 billion on the State's two juvenile halls ("juvies"), in addition to the $200 million Los Angeles County had already budgeted for renovations, in spite of repeated scandals relating to them. The proposed Bill was vetoed by Governor Newsom.

As the author of the CDF blog points out, $1 billion could do a lot of good if it was spent alleviating child poverty and seeing to the educational, nutritional and housing needs of deprived Californian kids - far more good than being spent on locking them up.

Look at the faces of the children in the photograph below. These aren't the faces of children who have done anything wrong, even though they've been locked up and have been forced to don the orange jumpsuits that adult prisoners in the US are made to wear. They aren't criminals, but victims - victims of a cruel and unjust system, that discriminates against ethnic minorities, the disabled and the poor, that benefits the wealthy and propertied elite.

That system is a juggernaut that masquerades as the democratic rule of law, but is, in reality, an instrument of a vicious and arbitrary tyranny.

The number of children and young people imprisoned in the US may have declined from its enormous peak (108,800 in 2000, according to The Sentencing Project), but it is still far too high, just as the total number of adults in jail in the US is far too high, 580 per 100,000 residents, or nearly 2 million people (see: here).

What will change all this? Only a radical change in the political direction of the USA, which cannot be envisaged under Donald Trump, under the Republicans, or indeed many of the Democrats. It must move sharply to the Left - but will that ever happen?