Didn't expect that last line ("BTW") but to be honest, I think something like that is the only solution.
If you look at society 400-500 years ago, brutal punishment of this variety was the norm: theft in Restoration England was often enough met with hanging. Since then, the penalties for theft and other "petty" crimes have been reduced, to the point that now theft has been completely normalized. People complained, for example, when charges against Amy Cooper were dropped in New York, but the fact is that you can get arrested hundreds of times in New York, and your charges will always be dropped, for basically any charge, theft, assault, domestic violence, you name it, they drop it. There is a total unwillingness by people in power to inflict punishment on people who punish ordinary citizens by committing crimes against them, sending the signal committing crime is not at all, in fact, criminal, but normal, expected and acceptable behavior. Non-criminal people will flee such environments en masse or become criminals themselves. The result will be lawless cities that blowhards like Trump talk about but do nothing to fix, and only make worse.
I am not saying we should go back to hanging people for theft. But we do need to figure out how to punish people without maintaining the Prison Industrial Complex. We need to figure out what is a crime (theft) and not a crime (drug use), we need to provide social services, food, shelter to poor people. We MUST provide education and opportunities to people. But if crime goes unpunished, perhaps in an asymmetric manner like caning, the lawlessness we're seeing today will grow much, much worse and make basic life unlivable in places that were once and still maybe are the pinnacles of civilization, like New York. It will destroy us.