Since you appear to have no wish to improve your sophomoric (at best) understanding of the criminal justice system, I'm just going to leave our conversation here. It's both pointless and frustrating having a back and forth with someone who has a childlike naivete about a topic but thinks they understand it.

I read Cali has 20% of all US prisoners and that was in 2017

Here is some info on why my plan would work and how illegal jails actually are


The data hub highlights two significant drivers of mass incarceration: the growing number of incarcerated people with mental health needs and pretrial detention. Forty-four percent of people in California’s jails have a mental health condition, and the percentage of people with mental health treatment needs has increased over the last decade. And 75 percent of people held in jails statewide are awaiting trial and have not been convicted of a crime. Pretrial detention exposes them to enormous harms: even a single day in jail makes people more likely to lose employment or housing and increases their chance of being rearrested. And California jails are themselves dangerous, violent, and sometimes deadly. But most jail and prison dollars in California are likely going toward jail staff salaries and benefits instead of education and vocational, diversion, or mental health programs to mitigate the harms of incarceration.

"Where's the line" arguments are almost always bad, since you can never fully quantify the subjective qualities of things.
So, society sets ballpark parameters and draws lines, hoping the integrity of due process and judicial discretion will adjust for anything that flukes outside its parameters.

"She has to be 18 to consent... and no, there isn't much practical difference between 17 and 360 days and 18 and a week, but for laws to work, there must be finite rules and society has adjudged, through its legislative process of freely elected legislators who write laws, that the line shall be set at 18, thus empowering the governments compelling interest in now allowing children totally incapable of consent to engage in sexual activity with people older... and yes, its possible a 17 year old could be way more mature than a 19 year old, but for practical purposes there's no way to enforce our decision by administering everyone a psychological evaluation and assigning them an individual maturity value, so instead we play the averages and say that 18's the number. 17 years, 364 days, no. 18 years and a day? Yes.".

In this case, the 'line' is probably deprivation of medical care, food or living conditions adjudged (again, via due process) to be unsuitable for children.
Other than that, in a free country, people are free to make decisions for their kids that don't directly impact their physical well being. Beyond that, society cannot manage every individuals psychological input from parents, so the government can't control that. If you want to raise your kids to believe in astrology or be bigots, nothing the government can do without opening a door to a sort of control that is totally unsuitable for a free society.

^ It's not intuitive or self-evident (to me anyway) that the idea of a free country, or freedom in general, has any correlation with the determination that parents should be allowed to control the lives of their children.

The alternative is the state controlling the lives of children, under whatever moral pretext is used.

You seriously fail to see the 'freedom' connection here? Or are you just trolling.

I think freedom should only involve the agency of an individual, not the ability of one individual to control the life of another.

For example, I also don't think freedom should include the 'freedom' to own slaves.

However, it is true that some decisions need to be made for children, so there is no perfect solution.

Since most parents have already shown themselves to be poor decision makers by having children to begin with, it is more likely that the state would make better decisions for the wellbeing of the child than would the parent(s).

How does this make the child more free from controlling influence?

It doesn't. I just said there is no perfect solution.

Ah, ok. My mistake then.

Figured your argument was rooted in something absurd, just needed to wait long enough for you to articulate it.

You have a tendency to make decent arguments, but then add something completely absurd that allows people to just dismiss everything you say. Are you really unable to see that the whole "people that have children are stupid" argument is never going to work?

chillrob has never been shy about his belief that we'd all be better off if humans completely died off.

Does not compute. Who is "we" in this scenario?

So you disagree that most parents are poor decision makers?

Do you think most people in general are good decision makers?

The world would certainly be better off.

Maybe that should give you pause to consider why you believe something is "completely absurd" instead of dismissing it because it is something unusual to hear.

I didn't say that anyone was stupid, I made a more specific claim.

So?

No, but I also realize that civilization cannot operate on the thesis of "everyone is garbage and the government should control everything" because that has been tried and every time, the outcome is vastly worse than allowing people to make their own choices and accept that lots of them are just dumb.

I think the reason 'most parents are poor decision-makers' stands as a largely true statement (and sadly, it does) is because we're now many generations deep into a social experiment that started in the 60's that has been deteriorating our social fabric very badly ever since. That statement was not true in the past, today it is and society reflects it.

I didn't say he made sense.

Which social experiment?

I guess that doesn't matter if you're completely self-centered.

Nah, I'm pretty sure that most parents, as with most people in general, have always been poor decision makers. Behavioral and experimental economic studies basically always confirm this.

A mainstream veer to the ideological left.

OK, define 'poor decision-making'.

Which parts in particular have lead to parents making poor decisions? And how are you measuring an uptick in poor decisions?