A social worker is walking down the street and sees a man lying on the footpath, moaning. His empty wallet has been dumped on the ground a few feet away. He has what will be, by tomorrow, two black eyes. A couple of teeth have been knocked out. He is bleeding, and mumbling incoherently.

The social worker shakes her head in dismay.

"My God," she says, appalled. "Whoever did this really needs my help."

The sort of person to whom that kind of story most appeals will not be terribly impressed by this week's official report on the probation and welfare service, with its talk of sending offenders for counselling or treatment instead of to jail.

Already we have heard the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr O'Donoghue, emphasise his determination to press ahead with the provision of more jail places despite the report's concern about the rise in the number of prisoners.

Perhaps Mr O'Donoghue was simply making necessary noises - ministers for justice are expected to be seen to be tough on crime and promising more jail places is one way of being seen to have the required toughness.

On publishing the report, the Minister pointed out that he had got sanction for an extra 39 posts in the probation and welfare service.

That the report was welcomed by the Opposition parties suggests there is a reasonable degree of consensus on its approach and that its authors can hope to influence the future of the criminal justice system in a significant way.

The most striking finding in the report concerns the brevity of the average prison sentence, which works out at 2.5 months served. This happens because 40 per cent of convicted offenders are given sentences of under three months.

The report points out that these short sentences limit the ability of the prison service and the probation service to work with prisoners in any meaningful way.

The statistics in the report also suggest that Irish judges are rather trigger-happy when it comes to sending people to prison, compared with those in some other states.

For example, in 1996 only 6 per cent of those sentenced before the district courts were fined, a remarkably small proportion. In the equivalent courts in England and Wales, 36 per cent were fined. The disparity is striking.

And it's not as if prison works terribly well: about 60 per cent of those committed to adult prisons have previously served a sentence. Of those committed to St Patrick's Institution for Young Offenders, about 43 per cent have previously served a sentence.

The report also calls into question the very high proportion of prisoners under the age of 21. A quarter of prisoners in Ireland in 1996 were under 21. This compares with 19 per cent in Scotland, which had the next highest figures, and 4 per cent in Sweden and Finland, which have the lowest.

The expert group, chaired by Kerry-based businessman Mr Brian McCarthy, believes this approach needs to change and that what is needed is "a significant shift in policy to facilitate the increased use of a much greater range of non-custodial sanctions".

Moreover, it claims strong public support for this approach. Referring to the submissions made to the National Crime Forum, which held public meetings in a number of locations, it quotes this from its report: "If there was one point on which there was virtual unanimity, it was that imprisonment is not a successful strategy for reducing crime."

The group also maintains that rehabilitation programmes, if used with the right offenders in the right way, are effective in turning people away from crime. It bases this on research elsewhere and pleads for similar research to be conducted in this State. The thrust of the report, therefore, is to keep young people out of jail and, where possible, to replace imprisonment with other sanctions.

These other sanctions could include counselling, compensation, treatment, mediation or combinations of these sanctions. They would be implemented by a probation and welfare agency independent of the Department, a recommendation which has been strongly endorsed by the probation and welfare office branch of IMPACT.

As regards sex abuse the report wants the treatment programme in Arbour Hill Prison extended to all other prisons which contain sex offenders - an obvious enough request, but a lot of water has flowed under a lot of bridges since that demand first began to be made.

They also recommend that nobody under 21 years of age, or convicted of a first offence, should be imprisoned without the court having first obtained a probation report.

This would all be terribly galling if you had suffered, say, your third burglary in 18 months and you had to stand by and see the burglar being "mollycoddled" by the court. But if sanctions such as counselling were accompanied by reparation (which would involve some form of compensation), then you might end up feeling better served than by a "revolving door" prison sentence.

The report accepts there are people for whom non-custodial sanctions are unsuitable - the violent attacker in the story at the start of this article is an example - but it proposes that we find effective and sensible ways to halt the rapid rise in our prison population (11,307 committals in 1997, an estimated 13,000 in 2002).

If the criminal justice system can show that these approaches work at least as well as prison and if it can vindicate the needs and the grievances of victims, then it makes excellent sense to implement the recommendations of this report.