Might I suggest the US stops putting people in prison for possession of drugs for personal use and a lot of other relative minor offenses?
Of course, the law enforcement complex and the prison industrial complex may not like to see their main reason for existence (and funding) reduced, so they are likely to fight changes to the War on Drugs. And if people are smoking more weed, maybe they're drinking less alcohol, so there are other interested parties who, by the way, have lots of money for marketing and lobbying.
The sad fact is that the USA isn't really seeing the worst of it. I read stories about the cartels in Mexico and just cringe. We are destabilizing our neighbouring nation, our important trading partner and ally over this issue.
Treat it like a disease, you mean.
We need to treat the individuals the same as if they had a problem with alcohol.
We should also plot out drug use on a map, much like the CDC looks at an outbreak of cholera. Look at the factors that may be contributing to increased cases (poverty mainly, but there may be other things), and then start working on those.
Lobbyists for PIC don't even hide it, they directly oppose scaling down the War on Drugs, because it will put an immediate dent in their profits. All political (who's voting for "soft on crimes" candidates these day? Nobody) and economical constraints (PIC) conspire to create this situation.
While I agree that the Drug War should be ended, I think people overstate how much of an impact that would have on our prison population. There are a lot of people in prison on drug charges because drug distribution is a core business of America's gangs. The drug war is at least in part a proxy war on gangs. Legalization would hurt the gangs, but it's not as if all those people would suddenly go straight. There's 1.4 million gang members in the U.S. The gangs would continue to operate, and if drugs were off the table, the gangs would go into some other business and end up in prison for some other reason.
Removing a giant market for gangs wouldn't just send gangs to work in other markets. Many of them would go out of business. This is precisely what we saw during the time of Prohibition--entrepreneurial gangs took advantage of their new market opportunity when alcohol was made illegal. They went out of business, or their power was greatly reduced, when Prohibition ended.
Decriminalizing drugs is a good first step.
Back to the topic at hand. A public lashing is probably a better solution for non-violent crime than prison. Something to think about.
There are primarily two things that contribute to the high incarceration rate in the US:
(1) Incarceration for petty offenses. Heck, pre-trial detention contributes a lot.
(2) Disproportionately long prison sentences.
Corporal punishment isn't a great alternative for either. If anything, it reinforces the brutality of the existing incarceration regime.
Obviously, the only way to get a message of disapproval into such an obtuse skull is via the nine whipcord communications lines of the Home Office cat-o'-nine-tails through the flesh of his shoulders and nerves up to his selfish, destructive, jungle brain.
Mm, the old anecdote + proof by obviousness. A classic form of scientific study.
Poverty is also something that society can do something about; if you say that the problem is that America has created a large underclass, then that's the problem you want to solve. Flogging won't reduce the size of that underclass; it can only subdue it.
Note that life in the slums of Victorian London was not any better than for post-Civil War African Americans, for example.
If you control for first-immigration immigrants along with socio-economic disadvantages, most of the difference in crime rates between minorities and the rest of population goes away. That minorities were/are imported and abused plays a role only insofar as existing racism and social stratification perpetuates the disadvantages they suffer.
However, flogging will not eliminate racism or social stratification; if anything, it will do the opposite.
I think that was the articles point.
If america was constantly subjecting black people to brutal physical punishment in every public square for no good reason, rather than quietly locking them away, they might have to confront a few truths.
Read the last two paragraphs. It makes exactly that point: The current system is dishonest in that it hides the brutality of the system.
To not hide it, people would have to see it, and the current prison system is brutal enough so that showing it would be enough of a shock; the problem is that it's not being seen enough, and I don't see how that would be any different with flogging.
No, it really isn't. Changing the punishment would be.
Decriminalizing drugs means that the very real health problems that drugs cause the users can be addressed as health concerns without the weird job-risking hoops that people jump through.
I can also give you the view from the ground level: I grew up in Portugal and in the 80s people shooting heroin in the streets was common. Now it's almost unheard of. Addicts are helped, not punished, and it just works.