It's a really important question, and it's a core part of defining ourselves as a society. Our society has a set of laws, rules, and regulations, written and unwritten, on how we are expected to behave, and how we are expected to treat one another.
Now, when someone steps outside of these rules, how do we treat them? I think we're pretty quick to simply say that you've broken a rule and you must be punished. Now, speaking as a father/parent, I know first hand on a small scale how ineffective and inefficient this is.
As people keep breaking the law, the mindset is to give bigger and harsher punishments, thinking this will act as a deterrent. At least in our household, this ain't so. What's been really effective is to actually go out and sit down over an ice cream cone and talk out the problem.
It usually isn't the action that's the problem, but there's something underlying the action that's the issue. I just dealt with something that turned out to be a bad case of peer pressure. But if I hadn't sat down and talked it out, I just would have punished the action, not addressed the underlying issue and the punishment would have been ineffective in the long run. Instead, I gave my son some coping skill for the next time.
Expend that up to a bigger scale. It takes time, money commitment, and a fundamental change in the way we look at "criminals", but which society would you rather live in?