Obviously, locking people up has NOT done anything to curb crime. We need punishment, but in a simple case like this, there can be fines, community service, apology to the offended, incarceration at night for 30 days and a lot of other things that might actually rehabilitate the person.
Actually, you're wrong. America's crime rate was a lot higher when I was a kid in the 1970's and the incarceration rate was a lot lower.
In this case of Political Terrorism against a child, cracking down on it hard would be a deterrent to others.
Funny, I grew up in the 1970s and walked around freely everywhere unconcerned and never saw any crime. Now, all I hear about is crime and I don't feel safe anywhere. Do you really think that every person who hates Trump is going to read some bulletin saying how this guy was thrown in jail for HARD TIME to be dissuaded?
In the 1970s, someone threw a drink at you, the two of you fought, dusted yourselves off and became friends. Now in 2018 America, a child doodles a drawing of a gun and is thrown out of school, arrested and has to appear before a judge. We have become a nation where we have more laws against everything than we can enforce, where police shoot a kid for talking on his phone and it takes years and a small fortune to get a simple case adjudicated. Yep, what the guy did with the drink was WRONG and he owes both the kid and the community something, and yes, we have prisons everywhere just FULL of people for everything. But the assertion that the rest of the world is full of criminals simply missed by their justice system is BULL. America is failing not only because it has CRIMINALIZED just about everything, but because it has HAD TO criminalize just about everything. In the process, we've only become a more violent society, more violent in our sentencing, more violent in our media, more violent in our officials, and more violent in our attitudes. OTHER COUNTRIES are starting to rate the USA as a place NOT SAFE to visit, and they are right.
The solution to a guy throwing a drink in a kid's face over something totally stupid is up to a judge, not you. If someone threw a drink in my face, I wouldn't feel "assaulted!" Assault is where you beat someone up. I might want an apology, cleaned up and maybe some money for my trouble and clothes. Our failure is the fact that we have groomed an entire generation of people SO ABSOLUTELY DIAMETRICALLY POLARIZED where such things are even an issue.
Sometimes all it takes is a few words: "I'm sorry." Prison might curb the symptom but does nothing for the underlying problem.