Would embrace of "judicial corporal punishment" help remedy mass incarceration?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this provocative new commentary by John Dewar Gleissner and given the headline "Who is biased against prison and sentencing reform?".  Here are excerpts:

Private prison companies and the guards’ labor unions are biased, of course.  Politicians do not wish to appear soft on crime.  Some communities need the jobs prisons provide. The public is biased about crime generally, and believes crime rates are going up when they are actually declining.  Many want prison to be horrible.  Who can blame crime victims? Taxpayers dislike money going to prisons. Law-abiding people do not have much in common with prisoners.  Businesses don’t sell much to prisoners.  Prison industries lose money and cannot succeed with government control.

The media prefer sensational stories about egregious criminal behavior. Once the offender is sentenced, the story usually ends. Prisoners do not have access to the internet.

Incarceration is hidden from the eyes of the people, harmful to the morals of prisoners and expensive.  Cultural, generational and religious bias prevent us from crediting our ancestors or other countries with effective crime-control techniques....

Attacking the supply of illegal drugs did not work.  The costs of fully supporting 2.3 million inactive welfare recipients, America’s prisoners, finally caught our attention.  The Constitution is the standard in conditions of confinement litigation.  But when the Constitution was adopted, massive incarceration as we now know it did not exist.  Back then, judicial corporal punishment was constitutional; it was approved of or used by all the presidents carved into Mt. Rushmore.

Incarceration is all Western civilization has known for several generations.  As the death penalty declines, most of us think of prison as the nearly exclusive serious punishment method.  Criminal justice systems focus on the single, inflexible, expensive and inexorable dimension of time.  Most Americans are shocked by the idea of judicial corporal punishment, which is invariably depicted as cruel, perverted or unjust in movies and TV.

Science proves that rehabilitation, restitution and deterrence are not often achieved by lengthy incarceration.  But some violent offenders deserve their long prison sentences. Prisons will not be abolished.  Real bad folks need to stay behind bars.

We think society moves forward.  Reformers are supposed to be “forward-looking.”  Belief in continual social progress ignores history.  Society periodically degenerates into barbarism, disorganization, bankruptcy, genocide, war and revolution.  Scientific study of changed values sometimes takes decades before conclusions are reached and legislation enacted. Our belief in social progress is accompanied by rejection of biblical principles in favor of unproven secular values.

We do not often enough look in the Bible for answers. If we did, the relatively simple solution to ending massive incarceration would be obvious: Deuteronomy 25:1-3. We could cut the American prison population in half. Modern behavioral and neurological science can and would confirm the superior effectiveness of traditional judicial corporal punishment. Believe it or not, judicial corporal punishment was largely abolished in the U.S. because it was too effective.

Judicial corporal punishment is in public, less expensive, much faster and repeatable. Its last use in the United States was to punish wife-beating without diminishing family income. In The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, Harvard law professor William J. Stuntz wrote, “Today's would-be reformers would do well to … consider the possibility that the best models for productive change may not come from contemporary legislation or court decisions, but from a past that has largely disappeared from our consciousness. Sometimes, the best road forward faces back.”