Portugal has tried one such alternative. In 2001, as the Washington Post reported, that country “decriminalized the use of all drugs” and decided to treat drug addiction as a public health problem rather than a criminal matter. The results? Portugal now has close to the lowest rate of drug-induced deaths in Europe — three overdose deaths a year per million people. By comparison, at 45 deaths per million population, the United Kingdom’s rate is more than 14 times greater. In addition, HIV infections have also declined in Portugal, unlike, for example, in the rural United States where a heroin epidemic has the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worried about the potential for skyrocketing infection rates.

All right, but drug use has often been called a “victimless” crime. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to lock up people who are really only hurting themselves. What about crimes like theft or assault, where the victims are other people? Isn’t punishment a social necessity then?

If you’d asked me that question a few years ago, I would probably have agreed that there are no alternatives to prosecution and punishment in response to such crimes. That was before I met Rachel Herzing, a community organizer who worked for the national prison-abolition group Critical Resistance for 15 years. I invited her to my classes to listen to my students talk about crime, policing, and punishment. She then asked them to imagine the impossible — other methods besides locking people up that a community could use to restore itself to wholeness.

This is the approach taken by the international movement for restorative justice. The Washington, D.C.-based Centre for Justice and Reconciliation describes it this way: “Restorative justice repairs the harm caused by crime. When victims, offenders, and community members meet to decide how to do that, the results can be transformational.”

Similarly, “transitional justice” is the name given to a range of measures taken in countries that have suffered national traumas, including ethnic cleansing and other massive human rights violations. According to the International Center for Transitional Justice, such measures to heal a wounded country and deal with often terrible crimes do “include criminal prosecutions,” but the emphasis is often placed on “truth commissions, reparations programs, and various kinds of institutional reforms,” or even, as the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation suggests, “meetings between victims, offenders, and other persons” to emphasize accountability and make amends.

The most famous of such experiments has undoubtedly been South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. From 1948 to 1994, South Africa operated under the official policy of apartheid, the legal separation of South Africans into four different racial categories with four different levels of rights. The South African government employed all the usual tools of state terrorism — murder, torture, beatings, incarceration, and daily repression — to keep the oppressed majority out of power. Eventually, international sanctions and internal resistance, followed by an extraordinary negotiation between African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela and then-president F.W. De Klerk, brought a peaceful end to apartheid.

In 1994, after Mandela had become president and the crimes of that country’s white regime were at an end, that Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to confront the country’s history of apartheid atrocities. Behind that process was a recognition that there could be no peaceable future without a public acknowledgement of the harm that had been done by those who had done it. In South Africa, even torturers and murderers under the apartheid system were granted amnesties for their crimes as part of a social healing process, but only after they had publicly admitted their actions and genuinely asked for forgiveness. It was not punishment but the acknowledgement of wrongdoing that marked the beginning of justice in that country and it seemed to work for many of those who had suffered grievously under apartheid.

A similar approach might work in the United States. Indeed, it already happens all the time on a small scale around the country, through community mediation services. These organizations help neighbors settle disputes that might otherwise result in a trip to civil courts or the pressing of criminal charges. An important aspect of the process is listening to and acknowledging the harm others have experienced. It might be possible to expand this kind of mediation to address more serious instances of harm to individuals or a community, and to work out means of restitution that did not involve prison time.

There are other alternatives to punishment as well. For example, as Critical Resistance suggests, instead of training police forces to “deal” with people experiencing mental health breakdowns by arresting them and putting them in the “justice” system, we might begin to treat such events as what they are: health crises. It’s a horror that jails and prisons have become the biggest mental “hospitals” in the country — with the Justice Department reporting that half of those now incarcerated have some form of mental illness.

Some communities have also begun to question the wisdom of the “broken windows” approach to policing first proposed by criminal justice scholar George Kelling and political scientist James Q. Wilson. They argued that when the police enforce laws and informal rules against nuisance behavior in neighborhoods, reductions in more serious crimes followed. In their seminal 1982 article on the subject in the Atlantic, Kelling and Wilson suggested that just as an “untended” building with one broken window was eventually likely to end up with all its windows broken, “‘untended’ behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls.” They wrote approvingly of a police officer who made a habit of arresting for vagrancy anyone who broke the “informal rules” of the neighborhood to which he was assigned — by begging for money at a bus stop or drinking alcohol from an unwrapped container or on the sidewalk of a major street.

Bill Bratton, New York City’s just-retired police chief, championed this “broken windows” approach to policing, including a race-based “stop-and-frisk” policy in which police searched New Yorkers on the streets of their city five million times between 2002 and 2015. Nearly 90 percent of those stopped were, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, “completely innocent” of anything and of the remaining 10%, only one-quarter, or 2.5 percent of all stops, resulted in convictions — most often for marijuana possession. But hundreds of thousands of people, mostly young African American and Latino men, lived with the expectation that, at any time, the police might stop them on the street in a humiliating display of power. In a landmark 2013 decision, a New York federal court found the police department’s stop-and-frisk policy unconstitutional.

Here’s another idea: Even people of goodwill who are not yet ready to jump on any prison abolition bandwagon might agree that we could stop sending people to jail for many misdemeanors.

In my state, California, there were 762,002 arrests for misdemeanors in 2014 alone. Of these, 92,469 were for drug possession, 1,265 for glue sniffing (a “crime” of the truly poor and desperate), and another 90,061 for being drunk in public. The largest single category, however, was driving under the influence, or DUI, with 151,416 arrests. That’s a total of almost 335,000 people arrested in one state in one year for crimes connected with the use of either legal or illegal drugs. Add to that the 58,569 people arrested for petty theft, imagine similar figures across the country, and you can see how the jails might begin to fill with record-setting numbers of prisoners.

Even when never convicted, those arrested often end up spending time in jail because they can’t afford bail. And spending time in jail can cost you your job, your children, even your home. That’s a lot of punishment for someone who hasn’t been convicted of a crime. In August 2016, the U.S. Justice Department filed documents in federal court arguing that holding people in jail because they can’t afford to bail themselves out is unconstitutional — a major move toward real justice.

So the next time you find yourself thinking idly that there oughta be a law — against not giving up your seat on a bus to someone who needs it more, or playing loud music in a public place, or panhandling — stop for a moment and think again. Yes, such things can be unpleasant for other people, but maybe there’s a just alternative to punishing those who do them.

I’ll leave the last words to a student of mine, who wrote, “My definition of justice is some sort of restitution and admission of wrongdoing from someone who wronged you in the past… My family has influenced my definition of justice in teaching me that even if someone does something wrong there should always be room for forgiveness and, if they are sincere, forgive them and that is justice.”

Now, it’s your turn to define the term — and so our world.