The news last week that Saudi Arabia’s High Judiciary Council told local courts to implement the concept of alternative sentences for minor crimes, in a bid to reduce crowding in prisons, is excellent. Young men jailed for trying to flirt with women, quarreling in public or being involved in domestic violence against their parents, will now be able to do useful tasks instead of being locked up in cells with hardened criminals.

The council, according to a report in Arab News, told all Saudi courts that the concept of alternative sentences had been recommended by the Ministry of Interior’s Center for Research in Combatting Crimes. It suggested that alternatives to being locked up in a cell could include the ritual washing of corpses, working in homes for the elderly, and providing services at rehabilitation centers. In doing so, the council said the use of alternative sentences would help ease the crowding of jails in the Kingdom.

Alternative sentences, of course, are not a new concept, and have been used in many countries to lower the number of people behind bars. In the United States and Brazil this is often done in the form of community service sentences where the person found guilty of a minor crime has to help clean the streets or serve food to the poor in soup kitchens. This is viewed as an educational form of punishment in which the punished person is expected to give back to his or her community with time, effort and work.

There were approximately 47,000 prisoners in Saudi jails in February 2013, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies at the University of London. The center estimates that there is a prison population rate of 162 per 100,000 of national population in Saudi Arabia, and that pre-trial detainees make up 58.7 percent of the total prison population. Interestingly, they estimate that 72 percent of the Kingdom’s prison population is foreign, within the country’s 104 prisons and 12 reformatories.

In Brazil, which has the third largest prison population in the world at 715,655 prisoners in June 2014, losing out only to the United States and Russia, judges have also been calling for the increased use of alternative sentences in order to ease chronic overcrowding in jails across the country. Brazilian jails are notoriously dangerous, many run by criminal gangs that regularly kill other uncooperative prisoners, organize bloody prison riots and run criminal syndicates — from the inside of prisons — that deal in stolen goods and drugs, using smuggled cell phones and the visit of messengers.

The Saudi Ministry of Justice is working on a new law that will regulate alternative sentencing, and it is due to be ready before the end of this year. This is good news as it will give judges the legal framework in which to issue their verdicts in which alternative sentences are handed down. Currently, judges may issue alternative sentences but at their own discretion. There is no legal framework yet in which to guide them.

Locking up young offenders, guilty of minor crimes, along with hardened criminals has long been one of the biggest challenges faced by prison systems around the world. The worry always is that in doing so the lesser criminal is influenced and brainwashed by the more dangerous criminals, who teach them all sorts of wicked things and in most cases leaves prison when his term is up more crooked then when he went in. The main purpose of jails has always been to punish ill deeds. But what about the need to rehabilitate criminals so that they can be reintegrated back into society once they are freed? We certainly don’t want young men being jailed for minor offenses later leaving jail with minds more warped and angry than when they went in. Providing them with alternative sentences is an excellent way to both at once punish them, allow them to give back to society in order to atone for their sins and ultimately to build the self-esteem of these errant youths so that when they are freed, they will do more good than harm.

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The writer is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.