Brehon law system -- Irish Restorative Justice
From facebook The Brehon law system did not use prisons. This is one of the most immediately striking features of the most sophisticated native legal system in medieval Europe — a system developed and maintained over centuries in one of the most litigious cultures on earth, a culture that distinguished between seventeen different categories of homicide, calculated the legal value of every tree in the forest by species and age, specified the exact compensation owed for every gradation of insult from a minor slight to a public humiliation, and did all of this without the concept of imprisonment as a punishment or a deterrent. The Brehon law system was based on compensation — the idea that a wrong creates a debt, and that the appropriate response to a debt is its payment in full, not the infliction of further pain on the debtor. The value of the compensation was calculated according to a complex scale that incorporated the nature of the injury, the social status of both parties, the ...
