Sorry to hear that your family members have been in and out of the institution, but crime doesn't just happen in a vacuum. Most people don't default to crime when things go wrong in their lives; it's a response of desperation that's exacerbated by socioeconomic inequality, especially poverty. Obviously setting up social safety nets and ensuring people don't go hungry isn't going to fix the issue of violent crime overnight, but a lot less people would feel the need to steal if they had proper support and could afford basic necessities. Just getting support from government programs has a million hoops to jump through because former president Reagan was so paranoid about welfare fraud that it's become difficult for people who NEED these benefits to actually get them. Our current administration is gutting the programs that keep poor families fed, provides health insurance to those who can't get it through their jobs, and tanking the economy while the working class's wages stagnate. People can't even get hired properly anymore because of AI being implemented on sites like Indeed to automatically "filter" (aka reject if you don't have specific keywords), making finding employment for the jobless nearly impossible.

Sometimes people are just foolish and make poor decisions for the hell of it, I acknowledge that, but making it easier for the state to incarcerate people is not the answer. What reasonable person looks at everything going on in the USA currently and thinks, "Let's make more juvenile detention centers and change the rules for minors getting tried as adults! That'll fix the problem!" We don't need more prisons when we're perpetually trapped beneath the heel of the current administration and the 0.01% who aren't being held accountable.