Do you ever look up a statistic, expecting it to be really bad, only to discover it is even worse than you could possibly imagine?
I wanted to see how many children were tried as adults in the US. I was certain it would be well into the hundreds, if not thousands.
According to The National Juvenile Justice Network, "Currently an estimated 250,000 youth are tried, sentenced, or incarcerated as adults every year across the United States."
A quarter of a million children. Children as young as 8 can be tried as adults in the US. Children as young as 13 can serve life in prison with no possibility of parole (known as a "death in prison sentence").
I literally do not have enough words for how horrific that is.
So, in contrast to probably 99% of the interactions I've seen from people I normally align with politically, I don't think Rittenhouse should be tried as an adult. But that's only because I don't think any child should be tried as an adult. (I also think we need to do some serious reconsidering of how we try adults too but that's another issue.)
A carceral "justice" system is a justice system that doesn't make people safer, disproportionately hurts marginalized communities, and does not act as a deterrent. All of that is magnified many times over with children.