Dealing with Criminals

These stats are incredible:

Between 1970 and 1990 the total prison population in the U.S. rose by a million, and crime rose, too. Since then we’ve locked up another million, and crime has gone down. Is there something special about that second million? Were they the only ones who were "real criminals"? Did we simply get it wrong with the first 1.3 million we locked up? If so, can we let them out? ...
We have more prisoners than soldiers, and more prison guards than U.S. Marines. We have more prisoners — by rate and number — than any other country in the history of the world: more than Stalin had at the height of the Soviet Gulag, and more than China has now. And China has a billion more people than we do! Something has gone terribly wrong.

Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore policeman who now serves as a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, argues that this is a serious problem and that the solution is to replace incarceration with flogging for minor offences. Sounds cruel and will probably never happen, but could be a good solution to a serious problem facing our country.