It's not the implication of tragedy, it's this:

> They were designing sentences not for people but for a thing: the aggregate level of crime. They wanted to reduce that level, regardless of what constituted justice for any individual involved. The target of Michael’s sentence was not a bright fifteen-year-old boy with a mild proclivity for theft but the thousands of carjackings that occurred in Los Angeles.

I guess it's just the overall tone that Michael is a victim of circumstances and the light treatment of the underlying fact that he paid for the consequences of his own actions.