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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.