The United States is the only country that has not ratified the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, and this film examines what that means in practice: roughly 70,000 minors held in American detention facilities, some in juvenile centers and others alongside adult inmates. A reporter gets access inside several juvenile facilities, talking with detained kids and the staff who run their units, including isolation cells used to keep young inmates separate from adults for months or years at a time. The case of Kalief Browder, jailed for two years awaiting trial over an accused backpack theft and who took his own life after release, runs through the film as its starkest example. The camera also tracks contrasting state approaches, Utah reconsidering how it detains minors versus Texas sentencing hard, and follows the rise of police officers patrolling school hallways, a shift the film argues turns ordinary misconduct into criminal charges and feeds children directly into the justice system.