Legally Competent Legal Adults
If you are a legally competent legal adult, YOU are responsible for your actions.
We already HAVE a legal framework that accounts for distinguishing "Crap happens and you can't control everything." We make distinctions between things like manslaughter -- OOPSIE! Someone died and it's kinda my fault -- and premeditated murder in the first degree in cold blood.
We have a legal system that has human gatekeepers who make judgement calls like "He's just 18 and clearly wasn't raised right and it's relatively minor garbage. Let's not fry him."
We ALREADY recognize that the garbage OTHER people put in your mind when you are a child CAN be a problem and doesn't instantly disappear the day you turn eighteen.
But it's backwards to act like old people are fossilized dinosaurs and absolutely can't help themselves. Old people have had the legal power to make decisions for themselves since she eighteen and the mental capacity to do so from somewhere around thirteen or fourteen years of age.
About age twelve is when humans gain executive function -- the ability to analyze and plan stuff in an adult fashion -- and it takes a year or two of practice to develop those skills. Which is likely why older cultures somewhat often have a coming of age ceremony around thirteen or fourteen years of age, such as the Jewish Bar Mitzvah.
If you have a defendant in court trying to CLAIM "I'm fifty or sixty or eighty years old and this is all I've known and it's long-standing habit and I CAN'T change." please don't agree with this ridiculous nonsense.
If they are eighty years old, they have had at least six decades to work on DELETING the destructive crap in your mind and they NEVER BOTHERED.
If they have been wealthy and privileged and educated their entire lives, they probably didn't bother because they were rich and privileged and expected other people to kiss their butt and put up with their crap.
Not because they NEVER had opportunity to fix it. And also not because they didn't know it was socially unacceptable or didn't realize it was abusive and criminal behavior.
And the way to bet is very privileged people who are defacto career criminals have been practicing their patter and their excuses and turning on the waterworks since they were five years old. This is just a NEW excuse in a long line of excuses for why no one can tell them no or hold them responsible for their actions.
Abraham Lincoln once declined to hire someone over age forty because he didn't like his face and felt that after a certain age, YOU are responsible for your face.
If you CHOOSE to be perpetually bitter and blame other people etc. you will have different lines on your face than someone who, say, laughs a lot.
Similarly, whatever memes are in your mind driving destructive choices, it has an impact on the body every single day which can shape your face. And it has an impact on the fabric of their lives, either helping them walk away from bad habits or helping them entrench them.
If you are eighty years old and completely insane and rampantly destructive because you NEVER did therapy or read self help books or kept a journal to sort your thoughts, YOU are responsible for the GARBAGE in your head making you like THIS. Because you CHOSE to leave it there and probably chose to grow the problem over the years.
It's not somehow someone else's responsibility nor can anyone else MAKE you delete bad ideas or bad habits or bad thought patterns.
There are plenty of sources that repeat such ideas, including in popular fiction:
There's no fate but what we make.-- T2
You can choose.-- Minority Report
Even without a LOT of money and privilege, you can keep a journal or diary to privately talk to yourself and figure out what you THINK about your life and read self help books from a library. With more resources, you can get therapy, take classes and travel to broaden your mind.
It is overall better for a long list of reasons if the courts make some reasonable effort to help young people course correct. But you can lead a horse to water, you cannot make it drink.
There comes a point where continuing to desperately try to reform people who clearly aren't making a good faith effort themselves is defacto aiding and abetting. At some point, the courts must say,:
"Enough is enough. If you are THAT screwed up and that incapable of taking responsibility for your actions and that impossible to reform, it is the duty of the judicial system to PROTECT the public FROM you rather than fretting ENDLESSLY about you poor babies and your welfare."
That is the essential JOB of the COURTS: To protect the PUBLIC from badly behaved individuals who don't WANT to behave responsibly.
If what you WANT is to fix people, maybe get a degree in psychology and become some kind of therapist. Too much dedication to wanting to believe someone's sob story and help them has absolutely no place in the courts.
And frankly too much of that is also a bad thing even for therapists.