Prisons of the future

[AshlynCreamher]

By JacobSloan on March 27, 2014 in News

Future Drugs Will Allow Prisoners To Serve A ‘1,000-Year Sentence In 8 Hours’

How will the worst villains of the future be made to atone for their crimes? Aeon Magazine speaks to University of Oxford professor Rebecca Roache, who hauntingly forecasts that punishment will someday revolve around the dilation of time:

As biotech companies pour billions into life extension technologies, some have suggested that our cruelest criminals could be kept alive indefinitely, to serve sentences spanning millennia. But private prison firms could one day develop drugs that make time pass more slowly, so that an inmate’s 10-year sentence feels like an eternity. One way or another, humans could soon be in a position to create an artificial hell.
Take someone convicted of a heinous crime. There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people’s sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence.

[martin48]

That is scarey. So if only the mind is slowed down, let's say in the 8 hours you take a dump (on the above pictured toilet) then it would seem like 300 days! But then one wank could last 6 months. There are pluses and minuses

[Stavros]

My first thought on reading this was -the last thing we need is a link up between 'big pharma' and the prison industry, but I now recollect that in the 1940s prisoners in one of the southern States were 'invited' to become guinea pigs in drug trials for malaria, or it might have been smallpox or polio I don't recall. There is an article on this in the Journal of the American Medical Association I think from 1947. Not long after, in the 1950s when it was still a colony of the British Empire, prisoners in Kenya were invited to become guinea pigs in drug trials, with the promise of a reduction in their sentence, so this was not available to lifers. Needless to say in both Kenya and the USA the prisoners were Black.

I don't see the time factor being useful either, not least because a prisoner after spending the equivalent of 1,000 years in drug time, 10 years in real time might go to a parole board and argue that in addition to being 'cruel and unusual punishment' he (or she) has served 1,000 years and isn't that enough?

The worst prisoners should be put away because they are a danger to society, that is basic. The liberal idea used to be that once incarcerated, prisoners would have time to reflect on their crime, and through therapy and education become rehabilitated so that if released, they would not only not offend, but find some sort of occupation and fit into society. I don't know if this still goes on, even in the UK many prisoners who have come through the drugs/gangs/petty crime route are actually or functionally illiterate. I don't know what the success rate in rehab is, as there are plenty of examples of prisoners emerging as born-again Christians, Muslims -radical or otherwise-, Marxist revolutionaries, and so on.

Drugs -as if their link to prison is not enough. No. Best leave it as an academic exercise.

[trish]

If incarceration were about punishment and not about rehabilitation or keeping dangerous assholes off the streets this would be a great idea. However, there are cheaper ways to make and hour seem like years: we could force convicts to watch reruns of The Amazing Race. A normal ten year sentence is probably equivalent to being forced to watch old episodes of Doogie Howser all day, everyday for two years straight. (The Judge said, "I sentence you to 12000 hours of Doogie Howser!"). These sorts of compressed sentences would cost fewer meals and fewer man hours per prisoner. Another upside is jail would no longer be a training ground for criminals. The downside is, jails would be producing and releasing into the world a new kind of zombie.

[loren]

If incarceration were about punishment and not about rehabilitation or keeping dangerous assholes off the streets this would be a great idea. However, there are cheaper ways to make and hour seem like years: we could force convicts to watch reruns of The Amazing Race. A normal ten year sentence is probably equivalent to being forced to watch old episodes of Doogie Howser all day, everyday for two years straight. (The Judge said, "I sentence you to 12000 hours of Doogie Howser!"). These sorts of compressed sentences would cost fewer meals and fewer man hours per prisoner. Another upside is jail would no longer be a training ground for criminals. The downside is, jails would be producing and releasing into the world a new kind of zombie.

Or you could just sentence them to work at Wal-Mart. "I sentence you to life at Wal-Mart." "No, give me the chair, give me the chair."

[trish]

Aw, dreamon didn't like my joke I'm guessing he's a fan of Doogie...or worse, the Amazing Race.