Joseph used his position as viceroy of Egypt to promote repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation in his family. When his brothers came to Egypt to buy food furing a famine, he accused them of being spies, then detained one of them---Simeon---and ordered the others to bring back their brother Benjamin.
Genesis 42 doesn't tell us why Simeon was the one Joseph chose to detain. A number of ideas have been proposed, as discussed by Nechama Price in her book Tribal Blueprints.
One possibility is based on the fact that Joseph's oldest brother Reuben had not gone along with the proposal of killing Joseph (Ge 37:21-22; 42:22). Simeon was the second oldest and should be held responsible for what happened.
Another possibility is that Simeon was more directly responsible for what happened to Joseph. Perhaps he was the one who proposed the idea of killing Joseph. After all, he and Levi had been the leaders in the Shechem massacre (Ge 34:25), and they seemed to have violent tendencies. If Simeon and Levi together were the authors of the plan to kill Joseph, perhaps Joseph decided to split up this dangerous duo by detaining one of them.
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