New Human Rights for Kids report documents those imprisoned for crimes committed as children

The group Human Rights for Kids has released this big new report titled "Crimes Against Humanity: The Mass Incarceration of Children in the US." Here is part of the report's executive summary:

The extensive negative impact on children from our practice of transferring them into the adult criminal justice system and treating them as if they were adults has been well-documented by state and federal government agencies, researchers, advocates and the press. What has not been documented to date, is the extent of the impact of these policies. This report provides the first ever snapshot and national estimate of the number of people in our prisons who have been there since they were children.

We gathered data from 45 states on every individual currently incarcerated who was under the age of 18 at the time of their offense. Our findings revealed that U.S. prisons are filled with at least 32,359 individuals whose crimes were committed as children....

Beginning in the summer of 2021, we requested data from departments of corrections in all 50 states and the District of Columbia on individuals who are currently incarcerated in adult prisons who committed their offense when they were under the age of 18. We received data from 45 states. Our analysis surfaced trends and findings across sentence length, decade of incarceration, gender, race and ethnicity. In addition to aggregating the data, we also conducted a comparative analysis to highlight which state practices constituted the worst human rights violations across categories.

We are currently incarcerating approximately 32,359 individuals in ourprisons for crimes they committed as children.  Some were so young they were still subject to truancy laws, and an astonishing number weren’t even teenagers.  They comprise a full 3.1% of the United States’ overall state prison population –- the equivalent of an entire prison full of children in every state in the country.  Notably, this is close to the total number of children in youth prisons of 36,469.  We incarcerate more children as adults in our prison system than the total combined prison populations of Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Scotland.  In fact,there are more people in our prisons for crimes they committed as children than people in prison who committed their crimes as adults in 76.68% of the countries and independent territories in the world.