As a general rule of thumb, any organism's behavior is the result of a combination of its individual choices and the environment those choices are made within.

As a general rule of thumb, any organism's behavior is the result of a combination of its individual choices and the environment those choices are made within. I don't doubt that you have family members who have fallen behind as a result of their own choices. But as someone coming from a middle-class white family, I can tell you that I have many relatives who have made equally poor decisions and aren't in jail, didn't get pregnant at age 14, and didn't drop out of high school. Now put those same family members in a lower-income and higher-crime environment (as minorities are more likely to live in), and I don't doubt that members of my family would have ended up in much the same situation. People make bad decisions to be sure, but it's silly to say that what happens to people is solely the result of their own decisions.