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A collective gasp was emitted last week when Judge Emmett Sullivan excoriated Michael Flynn in a federal courtroom in D.C. As the news rippled into our national consciousness, we suddenly remembered that Flynn had done some really terrible things. We had rightly been focused on the help he has given in his 19 cooperating interviews with authorities, and on the decades of unblemished service he brought to bear on his side of the justice scale.

We are grappling as a country with the deepest challenges around sentencing, like: was it ok for General Flynn's lawyers to argue in their sentencing brief that he was tricked into lying to the FBI, even as he relies for his sentencing relief on having taken full responsibility for his actions?

How do we feel, anyway, about so much of our evidence for crimes consisting of testimony of wrongdoers who themselves are getting relief from their own deserved punishment, or about the fact that a lot of our justice is up for bargain rather than fully deliberated in a trial? And in such a system, what happens to people who don't have information to trade or resources for their representation, let alone examples of good deeds to offset the reality of their worst acts?

It's hard to comprehend the complexity of sentencing—many judges say it is the hardest thing they have to do. No wonder it is the subject of intense biblical, mythical, and literary ruminations.

As citizens, and especially as lawyers, we bear responsibility—no matter whether we tinker with people's liberties in our own practice—to insist that our system be as accountable to us as we are expected to be to it if we are ever called to the bar as a defendant.

My practice is to expand the awareness and use of alternatives to incarceration so that we stop using prison and jail as our main methods of holding people responsible for what we deem crimes. To deter or prevent people from acting in many of the ways we abhor, there are much less invasive, less expensive and more effective interventions.

And since none of us is perfect, and we know our system is not either, we must try to identify the best practices so that we can at least do our best by the tens of millions of people who come into some kind of government custody each year in this country.

The nonprofit I work with, the Aleph Institute, harbors a vision we call “Rewriting the Sentence,” wherein the cultural and political shift that has already taken hold in this country produces a complete reordering of our punishment priorities. Once this shift is complete, we would view incarceration and other separation from community only as an option among many to be used sparingly, only when needed.

At present, we are such an outlying world incarcerator that we rank with the most heartless regimes on the planet. It always bears repeating that we are not 5% of the world population and yet are responsible for almost a quarter of the world's imprisoned population. Across history, incarceration has not always dominated the punishment landscape—indeed, in Biblical law there is no such punishment as incarceration because of the inhumane collateral damage it wreaks.

We at Aleph think there are often legal and humanitarian reasons for the avoidance of custodial methods of correction at every stage of our system—from bail reform and law enforcement assisted diversion upfront to diversion programs, specialty courts and sentencing advocacy at the disposition stage to clemency, reentry support and compassionate release toward the back.

A system that uses evidence-based tools at each stage can deliver the optimal levels of supervision and services to allow each person to thrive and stay out of trouble. Ideally—and I truly get that all of this sounds idealistic—we can use freed-up incarceration resources to support healthy communities, understanding that equity and thriving neighborhoods are the best prevention tools for crime.

What Aleph has learned from delivering care and support to thousands of individuals and families in prisons and jails all over the country for decades is that helping people function better is superior to an outmoded and misguided approach that inexorably leads to negative results, especially for the children left behind.

Here's why I am not idealistic, but actually a pragmatist. If we don't envision how we want the system to work, we will continue to incarcerate people none of us ever intended to incarcerate and to not know who we are incarcerating in a meaningful way.

We will continue to have a policy of separating people from their families for minor infractions, with nobody marching in the streets. We will continue to not comprehend the vast array of innovation flourishing in corners of our system of some 5,500 criminal courts, across jurisdictions large and small, that could be replicated elsewhere.

Nearly 20 years ago in Texas, I led a major effort to write and pass a landmark reform of the state's public defense system as general counsel to then-Senator Rodney Ellis. The Texas Fair Defense Act of 2001 catapulted the state from a morass of sleeping lawyers and defendants stuck in jail for months at end with no attorney into a modern era of deadlines, guidelines and reporting requirements.

The reforms in the new law were transformational, but arguably the most meaningful impact is that the law shifted the culture in Texas courtrooms forever. A young attorney practicing in Texas today would not remember a day when dozens of arrestees would be marched into a courtroom to be pled out en masse by a prosecutor with no defense lawyers present.

Or when the only guidance a partisan elected judge needed to enlist when assigning attorneys to cases was his campaign contribution list. Indeed, a culture shift is a long game, and hard to control, and might roll backward sometimes, but it is mighty when it happens.

Perhaps my greatest feeling of achievement came more than a decade after the bill passed, when I learned that notoriously heavy-handed Harris County, home to my one-time city Houston, had finally adopted a true public defender (we were able to encourage but not mandate it in the compromise legislation). It took that long for the culture and politics to be ready for that next stage of reform. Now the Harris public defender is considered a model.

Why do I think I will see a true culture change in my lifetime on alternatives to incarceration too? Because we are already seeing the seeds of the change, to wit: in a recent meeting with the chief of alternatives for a major metropolitan district attorney, I was told that in recent years incoming prosecutors ask whether there are alternatives they can offer to defendants. In a decade, perhaps they will expect them.

So policy wonks and idealists alike, please stay tuned as we seek to rewrite a legacy of sentencing myopia. Aleph is convening criminal justice stakeholders next June at Columbia Law School for the Rewriting the Sentence 2019 Summit, and we will announce significant new initiatives thereafter. For more information, please visit askssummit.com.

Hanna Liebman Dershowitz is a criminal justice policy attorney based in New York and serves as director of special projects for the alternative sentencing division of the Aleph Institute, a national nonprofit.