so lets just coddle them and continue slapping their wrists....right Joe?...
It depends what you call "Coddling".
If you see them as less than human, as some on the right are wont to do (Not you I would hope), then I guess throwing a kid who stole some hubcaps or smoked some weed into the same cell as a rapist/murderer is a fitting punishment.
I see more of an oppurtunity. How do you fix this kid? Because, frankly, we can't keep locking them up and making them career criminals.
NOw, yeah, you are going to have some outright sociopaths, and all you can do with them is lock them up and throw away the key. Even the Brits and Germans lock up about 80K people they can't fix.
We lock up 2 million. I find it hard to believe they are all "unfixable", but whatever is wrong with them, locking them up doesn't improve it.