I believe you need some prison as a stick part of the carrot and the stick approach. One factor that is left out in talks when it comes to social programs as far as things like poverty, hunger, malnutrition, parental neglect is the role of addiction in it. Basically liberals that want big government, want more money thrown at the problem thinking that more money will "end poverty" etc. when the real bottle neck is not the fact that parents and households don't have money. But rather that parents of these households spend their money, trade their food stamps, food debit cards etc. for drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, gambling etc. And such people likely have been in some kind of treatment plan before but dropped out, or stopped attending after the minimum amount of time of the court specified was served etc. So when that happens you need to up the ante and make prison time required. Otherwise these people will happily keep the status quo, unless they have some kind of near death "Come to Jesus" moment. But simply hoping for that sort of thing, in lieu of prison time is kind of like playing a game of Russian Roulette with their lives and the lives of their family.
That was a big topic of the former Fox star Bill O'reilly before his fall from Fox News. He had studied drug treatment programs of various states over the years in the 90s, maybe even as far back as the 80s. Only the states that had a coercive component to add some extra incentive to the rehabilitation were affective.
