deep down in my heart what I believe is that lots of people are just lazy pleasure seekers....
I'm 61 and every joint in my body seems to be in pain every day or most days...
but I have a job...I have responsibilities...I have bills to pay...
so I CAN'T AFFORD TO BE A DRUG ADDICT OR A DRUNK....
see how that works?......make people start early in life taking responsibility and this drug/alcohol sloth does not happen....work happens...family happens...church happens...
As for responsibility, I agree, I have been working since I was old enough to help (grew up on a tobacco farm), and I reckon I'll be working until I die.
I'm the family patriarch, for all practical purposes, right down to the 7 great grand kids, so I am the one to set the examples.
But there is a funny thing about responsibility. If you don't embrace it, it doesn't help.
We embraced it because with responsibility came privileges, so long as you continued to be responsible, and those privileges were worth a lot in terms of self-respect and the respect of others.
It isn't the same world. People would have fits seeing a 10 or 12 year old driving a bulldozer or a tractor, and that was the beginning of the things we got to do once we'd shown we could be trusted to do them.
As for those who won't embrace responsibility (or are prohibited by law from doing so--too young), I have seen plenty of that, from people who would have been my age had they lived, to those my grandkids' ages.
You can lead a horse to water, but if they can't drink they will resent the trip, and if they can, that doesn't mean they will. They don't have much to look forward to besides running the french fry machine when they turn 16, and by then we were running fire and ambulance calls.
As for jail being a "treatment center", from what I have been told (I have no first-hand knowledge), you can get anything on the inside you can get on the outside, sometimes easier. With all the bad attitudes and people who have made it their life's aim to skate out on responsibilities great and small, I doubt there will be much success there, either. It will only keep them from screwing with people on the outside, and sometimes, that's plenty good.