Criminals who can't pay restitution become slaves. No jail or imprisonment. (Exodus 22:2)

A versification note first: in the Hebrew text this is Exodus 22:3 (English 22:2 covers the case of a thief killed breaking in at night); the relevant clause reads 'if he has nothing, he shall be sold for his theft' (mekiratho). Two things should be conceded up front: there is indeed no incarceration system in view, and being 'sold' for an unpaid debt is a real and serious deprivation of liberty that would be intolerable if imposed today without further qualification. It is worth noting, without using this as an excuse, that long-term punitive imprisonment as a normal institution of criminal justice is itself largely a post-Enlightenment development — no ANE society, Israel included, had a penitentiary system to compare this law against, so a direct 'why not just use prison' comparison imports an anachronistic alternative that did not exist anywhere in the ancient world. What the law actually does is restitutionary rather than purely punitive: the thief's bonded labor repays the victim's actual loss directly, in contrast to modern imprisonment, which incapacitates the offender and costs the state without compensating the victim at all. And critically, the servitude is not indefinite: for an Israelite it falls under the same six-year cap (Ex 21:2) and Jubilee reset (Lev 25) that governs all Israelite debt-bondage, so this is a capped, restitution-tied term of service rather than a life sentence of chattel slavery. It functions closer to a modern restitution order or wage-garnishment arrangement administered through the household-labor structures the ancient economy actually possessed.

The law aims at restoring the wronged party and reintegrating the offender into free status at the end of the term, rather than warehousing him — a restorative rather than purely retributive logic consistent with a Creator who desires correction over mere confinement (cf. Ezek 18:23).