Adriver who is well over the legal alcohol limit challenges his cousin to a car race on a busy street. He overtakes his cousin at 120 miles per hour, loses control and collides with a truck coming the other way. A 17-year-old girl in the truck is killed. What kind of sentence is appropriate?

Six years in prison? Longer? Well, a judge in Florida decided to jail 31-year-old Arthur Pierce, who was at the wheel of the racing Cadillac, for two years. He also ordered him to display a large picture of the victim in his home after his release from prison. Circuit Judge Robert Doyel said the picture must be at least 2ft wide and displayed prominently. It also had to include lettering that said: "I'm sorry I killed you."

Can we in Scotland learn anything from this unusual form of sentencing? The reality is that we are banging up more and more young men and women in prison. Our jails are overcrowded. Research suggests that many new offenders gain a great deal of expertise about how to commit crimes more efficiently from fellow prisoners.

Re-offending rates are unacceptably high. What we are currently doing isn't working.

Faced with the immensity and complexity of this problem, the last thing we need is a series of gimmicks. The connections between crime and disadvantage are well known. If you live in a Scottish housing scheme or inner-city area you are much more likely to have a spell in one of Her Majesty's institutions than those brought up in more comfortable surroundings. Any attempt to deal with the problem that does not address these unpalatable but incontestable facts is not serious business.

Not everyone brought up in a disadvantaged area ends up in prison, though. Far from it. Therefore, issues of personal responsibility still have to be faced. Is the sentence made by a reformist judge in a country which locks up even more offenders than we do merely a publicity stunt?

We do not have access to the reports on Pierce which he had in front of him, but the judge presumably had reason to believe that the accused man, who admitted the crime, had some potential for getting his life in order.

There are, of course, people who have to be locked away for a long time for reasons of public safety. But there are many individuals incarcerated in our prisons whose capacity for change is reduced every day inside the walls. Can we do something different?

This is what lies behind the Scottish Executive's proposed programme of "restorative justice" for adult offenders, following successful experiments with younger prisoners in Australia and America, as well as in Scotland.

Lots of offenders and victims will not want to be involved in this voluntary system. Some criminals can hardly face themselves, never mind their victims. A model developed in Texas, involving murderers on death row, has produced promising results. Some criminals have taken responsibility for their actions by apologising for what they have done, and making recompense where possible. Numerous victims and their families have been helped on the road to recovery by at last getting answers to questions.

Many will see this as further examples of bleeding-heart liberalism. I don't think so. It gets to the heart of what it means to be a human being. To put it in theological terms, the biblical soap opera we call Holy Week was fashioned out of some pretty unholy material - fear, betrayal, sadism, abuse of religious and political power, the washing of hands, the fickleness of the mob, the spilling of innocent blood. Bad Friday can sometimes, against the odds, become Good Friday. Any programme that encourages the possibility of truthfulness, and even of forgiveness and redemption, has to beat an institutional system that recycles hardened criminals.

Meanwhile, back in the land of the free, Judge Mike Cicconetti of Ohio dealt with a woman who abandoned 35 kittens in a forest. Instead of sending her to prison, he sentenced her to spend a night alone in the woods. She emerged shaken and stirred. Cicconetti, the president of the American Judges Association, sent a man caught with a loaded gun to the local morgue to view dead bodies. A man who called a police officer a pig was ordered to spend two hours standing in a pen with a hog alongside a placard saying: "This is not a police officer."

Another sentence I liked was the ordering of two hardened, macho criminals to spend some time in a room decorated entirely in pink. Within days, they were screaming to get out. Sentenced to a month in the pink room in Barlinnie?

Give it a whirl. Just don't keep doing what we've always done, knowing that we'll get what we've always got.