Noooooo, what you're saying is to make the prison owners (slave owners) more money while getting them young. Private prisons and mental hospitals should be abolished. There are other countries that have free mental health hospitals and prisons that aren't horrendous that are publicly owned. They're doing it right.

One reason why these people are on the street is because people are too soft on mental issues and think that people don’t deserve life in prison just because they are young.

Prison is not a suitable environment for people with mental health issues anyway. It's simultaneously both a criminal issue and a health issue. They should be in a mental hospital, getting medical treatment until they are either safe to release, or indefinitely if they are not. We don't ask doctors to decide if convicts are safe to release, and we shouldn't rely solely on judges to decide when someone has a dangerous mental condition.

While involuntary treatment is an awful thing to have to consider and historically mental institutions have been awful places, so are prisons. And if we don't like that they are awful places, we should work to make it so that people have better support for mental and parenting issues before they reach the level of becoming criminals, so that fewer people need to be sent there, and also work to make them not-so-awful places, instead of simply deciding we will never send people there, which does not solve either problem. Because there is a legitimate need for these institutions for people of all ages, when we as a society fail at preventing people from falling into these mentally unhealthy conditions without support or treatment.

You had me on the first part, thinking you were going to suggest we should address mental health long before it gets to this point. But then you veered off. You wouldn't need the latter if we weren't ignoring the first part.

Right, people don't deserve prison because they are young. They deserve prison because they present a danger to the public.