Not that sympathetic.

in isolation 6 weeks

Its not a movie that translates very well to today. At the time the movie was made, kids weren't put in with the general population. It was rare for children to be tried as adults. Also our very thinking about the justice system was different. They weren't prisons, they were correctional facilities, the focus wasn't on punishing criminals, but in rehabilitating them so they wouldn't reoffend. A lot of that has been dropped as the public now is very much in favor of punishing criminals and no longer cares about rehabilitation. Also in the 30 years since this movie was made, we've seen a ton of movies like it, where the protagonist was wrongly convicted. When you have people who were on death row, or in solitary confinement for years, for something they didn't do, then 40 days in jail for drunk driving doesn't seem so harsh.

Agreed. And the truth is, the american public had turned away from the liberal mollycoddling by the time this came out. This was basically a last-ditch effort by liberal hollywood (hello, Martin Sheen) to perpetuate a false and ridiculous narrative about how criminals should never be punished.