Go back a re-read my statement. I said "I favor..", not "I would do...". God wants us to exercise compassion to our fellow men. The approach I suggested is more compassionate than the current system, which does virtually zip to actually rehabilitate "youth" offenders and lets them literally get away with pretty much anything up to and including some forms of murder. They reach adulthood as hardened criminals, and THEN we're going to try rehabilitation???
OK, I read it too pessimistically and I am glad to say my bad.
Still, ultimately, it ought to be a “I believe the Lord would want” (even if you or I should differ on the details) to get as close to our understanding of the King as we can. If there is a real King (and I’ve seen way too much in my life to conclude otherwise) then attempts to get focused on His will should, in sufficient time, converge even if approached from different angles. And in fact it does. When we look past the bath water we see the Baby in places we would never expect.
The reason being in part that even penal/corrective systems can’t exist in a vacuum. There is a reason for the term “penitentiary” containing “penitent.” It was an attempt to get gospel principles into what had been mainly viewed as vengeance which operated through sheer fear. However gospel preaching has gotten weak and there’s a lot of Islamic dysvangelism going on in our “penitentiaries.” Islam with its focused “jihad” might for the short term keep people out of what we call worldly trouble but from the best I can analyze the situation it’s basically a nice face on Satan. It’s going to yield a bounteous crop of evil later.
The good Lord leads me to strongly believe that the general answer to evil is the gospel. The familiar Christian salvation story from the bible, that even a child can understand and accept, coupled with earnest effort to mow down the kingdom of Satan once a person is within the sphere of salvation.