now please dont misinterpret this post as me saying i think we should go back to how things were done in the middle ages or whatever, but something i find interesting about early germanic law codes is that they involve entirely around the payment of compensation for various crimes. different monetary value is assigned to different things; a theft of a horse would require compensation including compensation for hours of lost time/lost work, and that would be different than the theft of a cow. and this extends to crimes where harm was done against other people, not just the theft of property. (and obviously valuing different people differently too which is obviously not great).
now this system is centered a lot more around the party harmed than current legal practice is, which was developed from roman law. today if someone murders your kid, you would have to go through a whole separate civil suit to get money out of the murderer. the criminal prosecution basically isn't concerned with your fate as someone connected to the victim at all. it's concerned with an abstract concept of justice, that does literally nothing to materially improve the lives of victims, who are left with legal costs, funeral costs, maybe therapy costs. if someone gets murdered who was like the sole earner of income for your household then you're fucked too. and again maybe they can get compensation from a civil suit. or like. charity. lol. "justice" really doesn't care about harm reduction.