There is a moment in every public conversation about children’s imprisonment when language becomes a weapon. Governments call uprisings “disturbances”, media outlets describe frightened children as “rioters”, and the public is invited to see young people in crisis as threats rather than as children who have been deeply harmed.

That framing tells us far more about the adults in power than it does about the children locked inside these prisons.

Let's try help kids rather than locking them away and forgetting about them while doing nothing to correct the failures that created them.