Yes, lets lock away a 17 year old because he aspired to a new pair of trainers that he could never have afforded in real life, and while we are at it we can give a stern telling off to the minister who stole tens of thousands of tax payers pounds to have his moat cleaned - except let's not bother with the "telling off" bit.
What the gubmint fails to recognise, especially where I live, is 20 metres from where the looting happened in Battersea, an area that has been decribed and redescribed as an area full of trendy young professionals, dressed in nice clothes and all wanting just to hang out in the swish bars on that road, is the Winstanley estate which is where the "So Solid Crew" hail from and is so economically deprived that even the Doctors surgery on the estate has to have boarded up windows as the norm. That economic situation seems to be mirrored in a lot of the locations where trouble flared.
Of course none of it was right, but I don't think that the uprising was without a root cause that has yet to be addressed.