I look at this 2 ways:
If this was the 1950s and communities truly pulled together to help raise kids and worked WITH each other - the system and family working together is the right thing to do. Hell - it'd still be ideal IF it could work that way. But the way things are now (varies by country) is everything is so liability driven. A legal mark on a kid's record - especially if tried an an adult (again - depends on situation and locality) can fucking ruin a child's life and put a series of events in motion he/she cannot recover from. You create feedback loops where punishments and consequences make future choices made by that child worse - not better.
I'm 38 now. I, as a pre-teen (beavis and butthead years - i also started smoking at 13), started little fires all the time. I played with lighters and hairspray. Friends and I would make torches and have sword fights with them in the woods. Once i filled a tire swing with dry leaves, lit it on fire b/c i thought it'd be funny to watch this flaming tire swing, swinging through the air. It got out of control. This was also the era people were branding themselves and my friend was taking a small propane torch and trying to shape this piece of metal into a shape for someone to use later. When the fire got out of control we ran and when we were safely out of the woods and in a neighbourhood, we then saw the mushroom cloud above the treetops where the propane tank we had forgotten exploded. I raced to a pay phone and called 911 and reported the fire anonymously. It took 6 fire-trucks to put it out. I spent months in fear we were going to be found out - that someone saw us run out of the woods, that a near by security cam at a school saw something.
We never got caught.
And we never did it again.
I would have been expelled from school - my family sued for the destruction of that property. I would have been put in junvenile detention and probably made a lot "better" pals there.
Instead - i went to college, i now make 100k a year. I have no legal record.
No one got hurt. it was a shit thing to do and a shit thing to happen.
But i can't help but think it's better things worked out the way it did. Some underbrush in some woods was black for a few years. Some fire department guys had to spray some water and had something to do that day. That's the worst that came from it. The overwhelming fear that my entire life was ruined and that any day now someone was going to let me know they caught us.. that was enough to keep me from fucking around with it in the future.
Realizing, just how fast that shit gets out of hand and how powerless i was to do anything about it...that was a lesson.
anything on top wouldn't have been any better of a teacher. it just would have made my life path worse.