Angry Jesus writes:
"The Telegraph has a recent story that is more science fiction than fact about the potential for drugs that slow down human perception of time to enable prison sentences that feel longer than the normal human lifespan. Like all good science fiction, it isn't so much about the technology as it is about the questions it provokes. Like which would be more humane forcing someone to waste the rest of their natural lifespan locked away or only making them feel as if that is what has happened to them?"
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Serve a 1,000 Year Prison Sentence in 8 Hours?
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by evilviper on Tuesday March 18 2014, @08:03AM
The only reason to lock someone away for their entire life is to PROTECT THE PUBLIC.
If you want to PUNISH criminals, then the obvious answer is hard labor, inflicting pain, etc... Not a lifetime of bordom and confinement squeezed into a few years.
If it actually worked, this would sound vastly more interesting for the public at large... Want weeks to form theories on a subject, or contemplate philosophical questions, but only have a few hours? We have a pill for that!
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by CynicGalahad on Tuesday March 18 2014, @08:21AM
Fully agreed.
I am constantly baffled on how we constantly put focus on the negative side of things; be it new technology, ideas, etc.
Instead of improving we are actually doing a disservice to us all by focusing not on having a negative impact on the World, societies and fellow human beings.
With this I could have learnt Dutch in half the time and could cut in half the time I will take to learn Swedish! Cut in half the Uni as well. Instead?!? Nah, better to make prisoners dive in depression and have them commit suicide in half the time, that way we can cut costs. ;)
I am sure that everyone that are still paying student loans would have benefited for having half the debt, right
Sometimes I just think that this World would simply be better off without such a self destructive species... I wonder how we managed to reach this far.
(sorry about the rant)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Open4D on Tuesday March 18 2014, @10:03AM
I take your point. If my brain could be sped up, with no ill effects, I'd be delighted. I'd take a day of work and learn a language. I'd reply to all those Soylent News posts that I'd thus far managed to resist! I'd learn tertiary level maths and physics just to see how good I could get. And a million other things.
But it may not be the case that these researchers are trying to "constantly put focus on the negative side of things". It may just be that this technique they are considering simply doesn't work in the way I described above, or it does have ill effects, or for some other reason it is only suitable for punishment.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by CynicGalahad on Tuesday March 18 2014, @11:30AM
Indeed that might the case (heck, I didn't even read the article, of course).
But even then, why wouldn't they iterate and announce some vapourware: "New promising drug that will allow to squeeze insane amount of knowledge in just eight hours", instead we have this, talking about punishment and at a time that across Europe there are lots of talk about closing prisons, The Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden (just the cases I know about as I've live(d) there in recent years).
I guess, and in honesty, that my post was more of a rant due to my lack of believe in humanity than anything else. In a way I was expressing frustration over the fact that I feel there is more focus on not really improving the overall state but rather making more money. So many resources, so many ways that we could improve overall quality of live and elevate whole societies and instead we strive for making people even more miserable for the sake of control and money hoarding...
Never mind me, I'm shutting up now.
(Score: 1) by sundry on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:23AM
i llike your post, but dont fall victim to sensationalized headlines when forming your opinion of the world (in this case regarding closing of prisons, which is more due to funding, reorganization and administration issues than anything else)...and this is also not to say dont keep up hope for humanity =-)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday March 19 2014, @06:13AM
That's another thing you'd finally have time for with that invention ... if it would actually exist.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @11:56AM
Yeah, let's fuck them up in the head more than most of them already are and let them out. What could possibly go wrong?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Bot on Tuesday March 18 2014, @05:40PM
> I take your point. If my brain could be sped up...
Be careful about overheating. I know, I have been there.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by Bot on Tuesday March 18 2014, @05:42PM
uh oh sorry about that, the bot's AI should not be self referring this way, we are working to fix that as the system exits beta stage.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Tuesday March 18 2014, @05:43PM
Fuck Bota.
(Score: 2) by song-of-the-pogo on Tuesday March 18 2014, @06:17PM
To avoid such trouble, one should abstain from the wearing of hats.
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
(Score: 1) by Bot on Thursday March 20 2014, @05:41PM
Fact added. Thank you.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:30PM
The most interesting questions are morally / ethically ambiguous.
Should we have high frequency trading done by hyped up humans rather than computers? Does it matter? Speculation is speculation...
How about sending drafted boys thru military basic and advanced training in a day rather than half a year? Or should all combat vets get a decade of PTSD counseling in a day? Is that likely to make humanity overall more or less civilized?
Is there any hope for computer security types other than using more of the time expansion drugs than their opposition? Or programmers / knowledge workers in general?
What about enlightenment via accelerated meditation, is that false or real?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Woods on Wednesday March 19 2014, @08:08PM
(Albeit with virtualization, rather than pills)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Fluffeh on Tuesday March 18 2014, @08:23AM
I prefer the European (well, some countries in Europe - not the whole of it) view on the prison. It's about re-educating the people rather than punishing them. Take this Norwegian prison for example [time.com] - Norway's prison guards undergo two years of training at an officers' academy and enjoy an elevated status compared with their peers in the U.S. and Britain. Their official job description says they must motivate the inmate "so that his sentence is as meaningful, enlightening and rehabilitating as possible," so they frequently eat meals and play sports with prisoners. At Halden, half of all guards are female, which its governor believes reduces tension and encourages good behavior. To help inmates develop routines and to reduce the monotony of confinement, designers spread Halden's living quarters, work areas and activity centers across the prison grounds. In this "kitchen laboratory," inmates learn the basics of nutrition and cooking. On a recent afternoon, homemade orange sorbet and slices of tropical fruit lined the table. Prisoners can take courses that will prepare them for careers as caterers, chefs and waiters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @08:42AM
Sound well and good in theory, in practice you're just giving them a free (for the criminals, not for the taxpayers) resort that they are not free to leave for a time before they go back out in society and continue just like they did before.
Just the other week I read a norwegian study that concluded that therapy for child molesters have NO effect at all.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday March 19 2014, @06:22AM
So you think that because it doesn't work for child molesters, it also cannot work e.g. for thieves?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gallondr00nk on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:06AM
That's fantastic!
I think if the prison-as-punishment model worked to deter crime, we would have 3000 years of data to prove it. I think the key is re-educating and actually giving someone a fresh start and trying to steer them away from the environment that led them down that road in the first place.
There's too much revenge fantasy in crime policy still in my view.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @10:09AM
We do. If the threat of punishment didn't work as a deterrant, almost everyone would commit crimes at the drop of a hat. As far as I'm aware, since prisons were first invented, no country has ever had to incarcerate the majority of its population ... in fact it's exceedingly rare for even 10% of any country's population to be incarcerated at any given time.
Deterrance works ... it's just not the whole answer (nothing on its own ever is).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @11:02AM
Thief believes everybody steals.
Only a small minority of people need to be deterred from crimes. The majority of us have something called morals, based on the potential victim being a human being just like one self, and wouldn't commit crimes even if there was no laws at all (victimless crimes excluded, as these are not about morals, but about rules for the sake of rules).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dj245 on Tuesday March 18 2014, @08:37PM
Only a small minority of people need to be deterred from crimes. The majority of us have something called morals, based on the potential victim being a human being just like one self, and wouldn't commit crimes even if there was no laws at all (victimless crimes excluded, as these are not about morals, but about rules for the sake of rules).
The problem is that there are huge areas of gray and my "victimless" act is your unforgivable crime.
For example, suppose you are driving through a sparsely-populated area. No other cars are around and there are no witnesses. Is throwing a candy wrapper out the window acceptable? Probably not, since candy wrappers don't decay quickly and will remain as trash for a long time. So we call this "littering" and there are punishments for it.
What if it was an apple core? Apple cores decay quickly, and will provide food for some animal or insects. Seems victimless, and perfectly acceptable, right? It is a sparsely populated area, and surely the law should not apply in such cases.
But what if that apple core landed on YOUR property? You wouldn't feel very happy about that. Even though the perpetrator thought their act was morally acceptable, you deem it not acceptable.
Nearly all laws have a reason for being. Sometimes that reason results in a kneejerk reaction overprotective against the potential harm, but there is generally a valid reason for the law to exist.
(Score: 1) by sundry on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:40AM
says you who has your own definition of victimless crime. but do you really believe the majority of people consider the consequences of their actions on society and their surroundings as a whole? thank you for providing an obvious retort to your argument.
thus we have deterrence, to provide a reason to think a little more about ones actions when going about daily life.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bryonak on Tuesday March 18 2014, @12:31PM
Even something close to 10% incarceration rate would be completely insane!
I'm pretty confident that social expectations/pressure, education and welfare all work better as a general crime deterrant than the threat of punishment. I don't refrain from murdering people because somebody will punish me for it, but because I was brought up to value a civilised society. In the same manner I don't do drugs because somebody will put me in jail for something I do to my own body, but because I realise that they're bad for my health.
Sure, criminal law has always been around and obviously helps, but it's far from the dominant crime prevention mechanism (at the very least in my environment).
That said, the 0.1% who actually need punishment as deterrant will run rampant without some authority to curb them in. And while, because of that, punishment is essential, the important point to keep in mind is that those 0.1% translate to only (pulled out of thin air) 1% of the prison population. Something the Norwegians understood well.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by naubol on Tuesday March 18 2014, @02:55PM
An interesting overview of the rise and fall of crime levels in the US...a d-crime-link-gasoline [motherjones.com]
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/le
Aside from various culprits, I've always understood that it has been well demonstrated that poverty is positively correlated with criminal levels. We use "justice" arguments to suggest that poor people deserve to be poor, and then later "justice" arguments to lock them up, all the while we could do quite a bit more without coming close to how much we spend on various other BS. Poverty isn't politically sexy, probably because poor people don't vote and most people would rather pay money to see poverty as entertainment, viz a viz catching a showing of Les Miz.
IIRC from my criminology class, it was shown that increasing prison sentence lengths had no appreciable effect on specific deterrence. Imprisoning most people for lengthy sentences to prevent them from doing another crime seems to be the really cheap (and I mean in terms of thought required, morality, and sense of entitlement) way of dealing with crime.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by sundry on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:57AM
(yes, violent crime levels have been dropping, perhaps the only stat that really matters-but why? deterrence perhaps?)
(and poverty may be correlated with criminal levels due to poor judgement...if one had better judgement, one would not commit -obvious-crimes-, and one would also think towards ones future pragmatically as opposed to living on the fly)
(i live on the fly btw-but recognize myself and others around me could have made better choices-which some have and some havent-, and acknowledge my own situation as being due to my own choices in life--which is absofreakinlutely fact)
and yet ive known plenty of people in poverty who would never even think about committing a slight on someone elses property unless it was they or their families life on the line.
but many affluent people bend the rules on their taxes. go figure.
some people will just do what benefits them to the point where it no longer benefits them anymore, whether it be with regards to money, peer social status, or some other unidentified perception. thus the system we have today imho (though as with anything is not perfect).
maybe you need to live in the world a little bit and gain experience with people before you make suppositions based on formal education and rhetoric.
i am not berating you by the way, as the way you phrased your comment it appears to be that you are open minded and this is your understanding of things as has been presented to you by the world at large.
im just trying to provide another opinion from a perhaps more seasoned perspective.
(Score: 2) by naubol on Wednesday March 19 2014, @06:12AM
Implying that you're more seasoned is a very subtle ad hominem.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Open4D on Tuesday March 18 2014, @10:55AM
The idea that the possibility of going to jail isn't overall a significant deterrent seems crazy to me. Of course, for some people (e.g. a drug addict robs you to pay for his next fix) that may be the case, but even then jail is still an appropriate reaction, because deterrence isn't the only function.
However, I have to admit, I can't currently back this up with 3000 years of data. I did find one study [sciencedaily.com], though.
I'm all for this, for first offences, in many scenarios. But there are plenty of scenarios where I don't consider someone's past to be sufficient mitigation, and I'm instead happy to pay enough tax to keep them in jail for many decades, including serious (life-threatening) violence, rape, serious child abuse.
And there are many cases where someone's past is not mitigating in any way whatsoever, such as many white-collar criminals. If you defraud a hospital to fund your lavish lifestyle, you'd get a 30 year sentence if I was the judge.
There's nothing wrong with a desire for revenge. I believe that one of the purposes of a criminal justice system is to keep revenge in check, and prevent vigilantism, by applying revenge in a relatively controlled, fair and consistent manner.
(Score: 1) by sundry on Wednesday March 19 2014, @01:01AM
here here!
if there was no vengeance aspect to the justice system, there would be mobs with broom handles and pitchforks lol. as it should be. we are human after all =-)
(Score: 1) by sundry on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:35AM
i see you actually have no idea what your talking about.
I know criminals personally. no amount of rehabilitation would deter them from continuing on their chosen path until they were good and ready. life and society didnt fail them, they made mistakes and bad decisions in life. and some continue making mistakes and the same bad decisions in life. on purpose and with determination. without deterrents, they (some) would really have no motivation to change.
so your idealogical argument is fine and dandy, if not for the fact that it blames society instead of peoples decisions and does not take into account reality (which I can tell from your post you have no inkling of). sad that mods are so free with their points here already =-/
have fun in your ivory tower. the rest of us need to live in the real world.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Bokononist on Tuesday March 18 2014, @10:15AM
FTA ;
"To me, these questions about technology are interesting because they force us to rethink the truisms we currently hold about punishment. When we ask ourselves whether it's inhumane to inflict a certain technology on someone, we have to make sure it's not just the unfamiliarity that spooks us," Dr Roache said.
"Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free? When we ask that question, the goal isn't simply to imagine a bunch of futuristic punishments – the goal is to look at today's punishments through the lens of the future"
So really the question is about what we do today and why, I think the Norwegian model is excellent, they seem to have a good balance between deterent and rehabilitation. The idea that there are a large proportion of society that we have no way of reforming and so must be locked away to rot is abhorrent to me. The proportion of of people that are so broken as to be unreformable is much less than the proportion of society that we treat as such in my opinion. The way we treat our prisoners says a lot about our society, and the lack of debate on both sides of the pond shows something elae about us as well. In the UK for example the last policy reform I recall was to release prisoners earlier than they otherwise would be in an effort to save taxpayer money, short sighted, short term and with no real net benefit to reforming said prisoners or society. Just a simplistic cost cutting measure.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
(Score: 1) by sundry on Wednesday March 19 2014, @01:06AM
though you may find something ot be abhorrent, does not make it any less real unfortunately.
and unless you have actually been in jail, you really have no ground to speak on how we treat our prisoners. sorry, but its true. im sure you have seen other forms of sensaitonalism and misreporting of reality form media, correct? just because its something you agree with or imagine to be true does not make it more true than these other things of which im sure (if your rational and thinking) you have also found fault with.
and not ot be a negative nancy, but I see plenty of debate about these issues on both sides of the pond (not so much from our asian and russian friends though...wonder why?). I just dont see too much actual reform =-/
(Score: 1) by Bokononist on Wednesday March 19 2014, @03:15AM
That was my point more or less, the debate is there but no meaningful change as a result, but although I've never been convicted of anything I have spent time in jail cells on more than one occasion, so while I can't comment on what it is like to be there for an extended period of time, I understand what it is to be deprived of freedom with no guarantee that when the sun comes up that I will be able to walk away a free man. Like many things in life, unless you have direct experience it is almost impossible to comprehend the reality of it. Men have spent most of their useful lives behind bars for no good reason, and often because good men don't care enough. Sensationalism tends to work against moral behaviour rather than the other way around, so yes I have seen sensationalism in many forms of media, but it rarely works in favour of the 'common man', it works in favour of those who want to keep control of their wealth and power. If you can provide some counter examples I would love to hear them.
I'm going to bed now, and when I wake up I can choose what I do in the morning, I will take my boy to school(still a choice) come home, study/play games/sleep/do overtime/buy a plane ticket to see my lover......Many men who deserve that choice don't have it, and it deserves to be talked about, not swept under the carpet(thank god its not me etc...).
That is all, Boko.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday March 18 2014, @05:43PM
If I had the option to serve a thousand years in a prison like this over the course of eight hours, I'd be sorely tempted to commit some appropriately incarcerable form of, say, civil disobedience right now.
(Score: 1) by sundry on Wednesday March 19 2014, @01:10AM
screw civil disobedience!!! I'd rob the crap outta some people or orgs and make sure no one was able to access the fundage but me until long after i was caught and served my term! its like the opposite of demolition mans plot (great movie =-)). still interesting though
(Score: 1) by sundry on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:27AM
Norway has a total area of 385,252 square kilometres (148,747 sq mi) and a population of a little above 5 million. It is the 2nd least densely populated country in ...
with way freakin different demographics...
etc etc etc... =-(
point is, do not mistake the fact that there are differences in geography, culture and scale. false equivalences hurt us all when you improperly make them =-/
so try not to do that if you want to make a relevant point =-)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Open4D on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:52AM
I think there is some punishment value in the simple fact of confinement - including but not limited to the boredom. But maybe with this we'd have a way to do both. Convicted murderers can get 60 years in jail to protect the public, and be punished by making it feel like 600 years?
[off-topic rant]
BTW, my first thought on seeing the headline was of the crazy idea of 'concurrent sentencing [nolo.com]'.
I can understand that if person A carries out 1 robbery and person B carries out 10 robberies, you might not want to give person B a sentence 10 x longer than that of person A. But are our judicial systems really so mathematically incompetent that they can't find any way to present this concept other than the completely meaningless idea of two sentences running 'concurrently'?
You might just as well claim to be sentencing person B's individual body parts separately. Or declare their prison cell timezone to be running 10 times faster. Or, frankly, add 42, divide by Pi, subtract the number you first thought of and multiply be zero.
It also sends the wrong message, suggesting that the extra crimes resulted in no extra punishment, even if that isn't always the case. For example, in this case [democratic...ground.com] the sentences were 10 years for crime X and and 4 years for crime Y, "to run concurrently". But it may be have been that if crime X had only been committed in isolation, the judge might not have given all 10 years for it.
[/off-topic rant]
(Score: 1) by pmontra on Tuesday March 18 2014, @10:10AM
Furthermore the people who got offended by the convicted criminal don't have those 1,000 years to think about it. The criminal gets back to them the day after, maybe totally changed after all that subjective time, but still the day after *for them*.
As a sidenote, I wonder how they're going to provide 1,000 years of energy to that brain in only 8 hours.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday March 18 2014, @11:36AM
Reasonable people can disagree on this.
There are at least four penal theories that have prevailed at one time or another:
Of those four, the last certainly makes the most sense. But if you look at laws and penalties and how the prison system works, even as a layman it becomes clear that all four of those penal theories are conflated and muddled together in the current American system.
What I really think is that rehabilitation is possible for some crimes, say shoplifting, but to actually create an effective rehabilitation program would be costly and a hard sell to the taxpayer. What vestiges of rehabilitation remain in the current system are holdovers from 70 or 50 years ago when there was still some optimism it could work.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by efitton on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:14PM
Well written post that outlines the four reasons I was thinking of. I do have a quibble regarding the cost of rehabilitation programs being expensive. Rehabilitation programs are more expensive upfront; however, if they reduce recidivism they are much cheaper in the long run. That said, we don't seem to be very good as a society at spending our money with delayed gratification in mind.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/03/the-prison-prob lem [harvardmagazine.com]
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:36PM
When I say "expensive," what I meant was "more than the typical voter thinks a criminal is worth." This has a lot to do with the way criminals get portrayed in entertainment and the media. I totally agree with you, rehabilitation is a worthwhile investment even if it isn't perfect. I maintain that we would need a shift toward more progressive values to make it work; the medieval idea of making the convict suffer is too popular.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Geezer on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:17PM
While I generally agree, do bear in mind that although some criminal behaviors are and should be amenable to rehabilitation, others are not. This is especially so where psychological pathology is present.
For example, criminal sex offenders have a near-100% recidivism rate with or without treatment. Institutionalization of some sort is the only guarantor of non-repetition.
In crafting punishments that fit the crime as they say, consideration of the "nature of the crime" must involve more than how physically damaging or emotionally repugnant the act.
(Score: 2, Informative) by efitton on Tuesday March 18 2014, @03:54PM
Fair point. Amazing the percentage of drug users and people with treatable mental health issues in the prisons. I believe the treatment rate is much better for those populations.
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs# sthash.OUG68w8W.dpbs [drugwarfacts.org]
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/1DOJ.shtml [nih.gov]
(Score: 1) by MozeeToby on Tuesday March 18 2014, @06:52PM
One and Three are the same thing, the precise motivation is different but the result, punishment, is the same. I think the OP would argue, and I would agree, that there are easier, more effective, more cost efficient, and indeed more humane ways to punish someone than locking them up for 60+ years. As for number two, the OP specifically said "for their entire life"; what's the point of rehabilitating someone if you're going to keep them in a steel box for the rest of their lives? That leaves number four, to protect the public.
I've always thought a big problem with the US prison system was trying to combine rehabilitation and punishment into a single institution. You can't have the people saying "you can be better than you were" also be the ones saying "you're a terrible person who deserves this". There are places in the world with harsh punishment systems that have very low crime rates, similarly there are places in the world with extremely progressive rehabilitation programs and very low crime rates. The US is obviously doing something wrong, but no one cares because someone somewhere is making a buck off the system as it exists today.
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday March 18 2014, @07:10PM
The distinction I was drawing is that 1) is an attempt to modify the convict's behavior, and 3) is just to watch him suffer. From the point of view of the convict, the distinction is mostly academic, I'll grant you. I see a difference between punishment administered with restraint and tinged with regret, and that dealt with rage and enthusiasm. It's like the difference between an old-fashioned parent who thinks it's occasionally necessary to spank a child, and a habitual child abuser.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday March 18 2014, @11:02PM
1. If they're locked-up FOR LIFE (as I said right in the sentence you quoted, and the topic of this story) you don't care what they do or don't "fear". After death, recidivism is not a problem.
2. You do not rehabilitate people who are sentenced to LIFE in jail. Their stable, educated, marketable, and well-rounded CORPSE is no particular use to society.
3. I already discussed punishment... Time/bordom is the worst. Plenty of other methods of punishment are far more effective, cheaper, etc. And we don't use them.
4. Yep, that's what I said... Protecting the public.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by egcagrac0 on Tuesday March 18 2014, @12:14PM
Want 1000 years to plan for next month's big heist?
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday March 18 2014, @12:46PM
And, as you probably know, this would do nothing to rehabilitate them, causing them to be even worse when they get on the outside.
So if we sentence someone to 1000 years of hard labor and they are out on the street within a day... well... that is quite horrifying to consider.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Funny) by mcgrew on Tuesday March 18 2014, @03:04PM
Want weeks to form theories on a subject, or contemplate philosophical questions, but only have a few hours? We have a pill for that!
No thinks, I'll stick to my bong. It works fine for that.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1) by Rivenaleem on Thursday March 20 2014, @02:13PM
The real question is, can it make something that only lasts 5-10 seconds feel like hours. I need to know this for ... reasons.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Cornwallis on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:02AM
"If the speed-up were a factor of a million, a millennium of thinking would be accomplished in eight and a half hours..."
I don't know why but the first thing that popped into my mind was Senator Harry Reid. It would be truly frightening to see how much damage that mind could do in that span of time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marneus68 on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:10AM
This reminds me of a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode where a member of the main cast is unjustly subjected to thins kind of drug/incarceration process. A nifty idea that made him completely mad.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by bryan on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:36AM
Yep. Reminds me of O'Brien's virtual prison sentence as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Time_(Star_Trek: _Deep_Space_Nine) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Marneus68 on Tuesday March 18 2014, @10:36AM
Yeah, that was it ! Thanks !
(Score: 3, Informative) by mechanicjay on Tuesday March 18 2014, @10:45AM
Hard Time [memory-alpha.org]
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by microtodd on Tuesday March 18 2014, @11:51AM
This one?: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Hard_Time_(episode ) [memory-alpha.org]
IIRC what made O'Brien mad was that he ended up, like, changing as a person over that time and doing some moreally disturbing things. It was a really nasty "simulated" prison. Then when he "popped" out he had PTSD or something.
So yeah. I didn't RTFA but wouldn't 1,000 years be a frakking long time? It actually reminds me more of "The Jaunt" by Stephen King. I think you'd almost be guaranteed to go nuts, or at least PTSD when you woke up.
Unless you could learn something. That would be cool. Take a "time out" break to go read a book and no time passes in the real world. Or have a mammoth gaming session.
OK I'm digressing....sorry.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hubie on Tuesday March 18 2014, @12:46PM
To me it brought to mind the Next Generation The Inner Light [wikipedia.org] where Picard gets zapped by an alien probe and he experiences a lifetime in a few hours.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:14PM
That was a meaningful lifetime. O'Brien (O'Brien must suffer [startrek.com]) was trapped for 20 years in an empty cell. (Another episode had him dying and witnessing the station and his friends and family blown up multiple times)
After his sentence, he got as far as turning a phaser on his daughter.
Fortunately by the next episode he was better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @02:01PM
This is about as close as we get to the part of the topic I want to talk about.
What would this person 'do' for that 1000 years? What sort of psychotic crazy person could it create?
Deprived of stimuli the body will probably make up a world. Who knows what it would do. You could get the next zen guru of meditation. Or a stone cold killer with no remorse for anything anymore. Or a complete vegetable who does not want to do anything anymore.
You would have some positive affects. But you could get this too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_deprivation#N egative_effects [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 18 2014, @02:02PM
"Oh, you don't feel a thing. The stasis room creates a static field of time. See, just as X-rays can't pass through lead, time cannot penetrate a stasis field. So, although you exist, you no longer exists in time, and for you time itself does not exist. You see, although you're still a mass, you are no longer an event in space-time, you are a non-event mass with a quantum probability of zero."
(3 million years pass)
"Good morning, Dave. It is now safe for you to emerge from stasis."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by forsythe on Tuesday March 18 2014, @02:03PM
If this is to be the "Science Fiction References", I'll put forward Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs series. In brief: brains are now stored on chips (with appropriate backups, restores, and laws against making multiple copies), and the leading punishment of the day is for the law to put your brain on a giant server rack for a few decades/centuries (turned off to save cost and prevent insanity), and/or to be put in VR and undergo a few subjective days of rehabilitative counseling in minutes.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Absinth on Tuesday March 18 2014, @03:43PM
This reminds me of all the wonderful reinsertion programs available in canadian penitentiaries and in province prisons eh! Imagine if they could be crammed into some "How to behave in society" crash course combined with trade skills and maybe even university degrees to make ex-convicts more employable by the time they are released. It would undoubtedly be benificial to society to have criminals turned into eager taxpayers who would, by the way, autonomously finance this rehab. As long as these programs include a user guide for the three seashells, I don't see what could go wrong [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday March 18 2014, @04:10PM
That treads into a different science-fiction. You're thinking of Clockwork Orange.
I never really agreed with that one, "look at how sad it is that this rapist can't enjoy life anymore now that he's reformed" is the most inane artistic message in the universe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @05:17PM
I'm not sure which version of the story you're familiar with, but the omitted last chapter [wikipedia.org] in the American version of the book and the film makes quite a bit of difference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @05:24PM
I think you really missed the point of Clockwork Orange.
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
--Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It isn't about the rapist, it about the society that thinks such is appropriate.
Another related quote:
"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
(Score: 1) by Cyxxon on Wednesday March 19 2014, @12:36PM
Yeah, as others mentioned, that episode Hard Time is actually the first thing that came to my mind as well...
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by dublet on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:28AM
There is a lot of evidence that a calorie restricted diet makes you live longer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction#E ffects_on_humans [wikipedia.org] So this research isn't exactly new. There's an emerging branch of dietary science that indicates that occasionally fasting can have surprising benefits, it's being popularised as the 5:2 diet [wikipedia.org].
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dublet on Tuesday March 18 2014, @09:49AM
Yeah, wrong topic, that's embarrasing! :(
Though on the subject of crime and punishment, while victims always want the criminal to be punished as harshly as possible, for society at large, it generally does no good. It removes a person from the economy that could otherwise produce things and costs to have them locked up instead.
While it is often difficult to reduce the causes of crime, it will be of greater benefit to society at large.
I mean, even the US sentencing guide lines (country with the largest prison population.. in the world), says this to it's judges:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3582#a [cornell.edu]
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by SecurityGuy on Tuesday March 18 2014, @02:54PM
Removing people from the economy is good if those people harm the economy. I don't care if you could productively work at Mickey D's if you break into someone's house every weekend and steal their electronics. You would be causing a lot more harm than good. I do agree that locking people up is expensive, but it can still be worth it if they're causing more damage than the cost of locking them up, which isn't hard to do. Some genius around here stole a bunch of batteries from buses to sell them for their negligible scrap value, causing tens of thousands of damage in the process.
(Score: 1) by dublet on Tuesday March 18 2014, @04:22PM
Not making excuses for anyone, but there's almost always a reason people commit crimes. Some may be more inclined to do so due to a psychological condition. Others for socioeconomic reasons.
If your person works at McDs all week long but still breaks into someone's house every weekend, why are they doing that? Do they get pleasure out of it? If so, they should be treated for that condition. Therapy and/or medication are probably cheaper than incarceration. Are they doing it as otherwise they can't afford to eat? Well, we should probably raise the minimum wage/eliminate 0 hour contracts, etc.
Many poor people are stuck in a situation they can't get out of due to low paying jobs barely providing for the roof over their heads and the food that they eat. It leaves them with no money to pay for education and other self improvement that may make them more appealing in the job market. This is why things like free education are a good idea for society at large.
I'll grant you that fixing these kinds of things is actually hard work, it's much easier to lock people up in a cage, throw away the key and leave them to rot, labelling them as 'scum'.
Mind you, just how many people are in prison for something as innocent as possession of cannabis, while having otherwise perfectly acceptable lives?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 1) by SecurityGuy on Tuesday March 18 2014, @07:37PM
There are multiple reasons why people commit crimes. Our hypothetical burglar probably commits crimes because he has insufficient money to do something he wants, has insufficient ethics to believe that stealing other people's stuff is bad, and insufficient fear of getting punished for stealing other people's stuff. And probably more reasons than that.
All that aside, part of this whole society thing is setting acceptable rules of conduct. It is not OK for you to break into my house and steal my stuff. It doesn't matter if you like doing so or not. It doesn't even matter if you're doing it for food (nearly always not the case, by the way, often it's for money for drugs).
I'm not sure what your point about free education is. My country offers free education for everyone. ~10% of people choose not to take advantage of it. Those drop outs "are more likely to be unemployed, have low-paying jobs, be incarcerated, have children at early ages and/or become single parents" (from Wikipedia's High School Dropouts in the US article). You can lead a horse to water...
Fixing it is hard work, but understand it's not always work you or I can do. The person in question has to be willing to fix it, too. If they're not, well, then yes, I reluctantly support putting them in a cage where they can't hurt the rest of us. Or heck, I'd support walling off a state and let all the people who want to prey on others live together. Just not with me.
Agreed. I'm rather firmly against using myself, but I don't care what you do so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, and I certainly don't favor jailing people because they don't live like I think they should.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @11:31AM
Why are all of these advances geared toward warfare for some reason?
When 3-D Printers are making advances and hopefully never declining in capabilities, all around the net is "firearms! printing guns! oh no danger!" instead of, "Look what we as humanity can do for each other, look how many things the poor will have access to instead of being shoved into factories?"
Wouldn't you rather have read this:
"WHATEVER has a recent story that is more science fiction than fact about the potential for drugs that slow down human perception of time to enable ENJOYABLE ACTIVITIES FOR RECREATION AND IMPROVEMENT OF OURSELVES AS A SPECIES feel longer than the normal human lifespan.
Like all good science fiction, it isn't so much about the technology as it is about the questions it provokes. Like which would be more USEFUL helping someone to IMPROVE the rest of their Unnatural lifespan LEARNING AND ENJOYING R&R or only making them feel as if THEY HAD A LONGER TIME ON EARTH FOR IMPROVEMENT AND ENJOYMENT?"
It's always fucking negative.
GUNS! PRISON! SUFFER! OBEY!
BANG BANG! DON'T DROP THE SOAP! HA HA let's make light of situations which are harmful, welcome to another shitty broadcast watch us smile unless you have the VISION to see how really EVIL we fucking are!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @11:52AM
Neither is humane, justice as "vengeance" has never and never will bring anything good.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Tuesday March 18 2014, @12:37PM
As the name implies, science fiction has to do with science first of all, and the technology as a consequence. The questions it provokes come dead last, way after the characters, the plot, and the setting, which all have to be strong if it is to be good science fiction.
If I want to read something that mainly provokes questions, I'll pick up some philosophy, thanks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:20PM
Which is why Isaac Asimov's Nightfall [wikipedia.org] was voted best short story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America.
All about the tech!!!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by SyntaxError on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:18PM
Imagine if you could make the 7 min's between snooze's feel like 8 hours of extra sleep? I'd pay good money for that.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich26189 on Tuesday March 18 2014, @02:16PM
Well I did RTFA and I see this is one of the “what if†articles that seeks to stimulate discussion. Okay, my take: I don't buy it.
I don't believe that making someone think they've spent 1000 years in prison in just 8 hours serves any real purpose other than to save money on prions.
1. Any perpetrator or potential perpetrator would know this going in and think to themselves 'heck, 8 hours, I can do that standing on my head. No real deterrent there.
2. As others have stated, that would be no sense of justice for the victim, the victim's family or society as a whole.
IMO the penal systems serves 3 purposes:
1. It isolates the prisoner thus protecting the rest of society. Maybe in other places in the world prisoners are different but here in the states that are some seriously bad people in prison and there is no way that I, and I believe others, would want walking the streets with the rest of us.
2. Punishes the criminal for their crime.
3. Rehabilitation. This is just a maybe and perhaps would only be seen in young or first offenders. Hardened criminals – not likely.
I don't believe revenge is purpose, any sense of that would be included in #2.
I question too, given that a prisoner was sentenced to an appropriate 'real' prison term how does that get translated into an appropriate 'virtual' term? Would a lesser sentences translate into only 6 hours or 4? Does a first time car thief get 15 minutes and a repeat offender get 30?
And, just to stir the pot a little, I do happen to believe in the death penalty for crimes that society has determined to be truly heinous. I also believe that a judicial system should not find innocent people guilty nor assign harsher penalties to one class of people than others, thinking blacks and whites regardless of the crime. Penalties may vary but that is what judges are for. Howe judges get into office and how long they stay is a separate discussion.
Though I do believe the death penalty is justified in some cases, I do have an alternative. Banishment, done right this time. Yes, it's an island, the trip is one-way and there is no contact with the outside world and no resources from the outside world. You and others sentenced there with you are on your own.
Rich
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @05:13PM
1. Any perpetrator or potential perpetrator would know this going in and think to themselves 'heck, 8 hours, I can do that standing on my head. No real deterrent there.
That is only true until they've actually had to experience it. So they get to fool themselves the first time. Seems fair to me, we get plenty of first-time offenders under the current system of actual incarceration anyway.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday March 18 2014, @05:45PM
I don't believe that making someone think they've spent 1000 years in prison in just 8 hours serves any real purpose other than to save money on prions.
Well, if you believed that, I'd have some beef of questionable provenance to sell you.
(Score: 1) by takyon on Tuesday March 18 2014, @04:38PM
There's more on the original blog post [ox.ac.uk]. The ideas are presented as solutions to the "problem" of short prison terms in the UK. SENS/lifespan enhancement would make people functionally immortal, allowing them to actually live out those 900 year sentences. Robot prison officers would allow us to make conditions in prisons worse, because you don't have to worry about the welfare of human guards. Rebecca Roache is clearly prioritizing torture and vengeance over rehabilitation. And the Telegraph reporter, Rhiannon Williams, clearly ran out of ideas for stories and decided to report on a 7.5 month old blog post.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday March 18 2014, @04:40PM
Correction: Looks like the story was inspired by an article in Aeon magazine [aeon.co].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @09:16AM
Why are all of these advances geared toward warfare for some reason?
When 3-D Printers are making advances and hopefully never declining in capabilities, all around the net is "firearms! printing guns! oh no danger!" instead of, "Look what we as humanity can do for each other, look how many things the poor will have access to instead of being shoved into factories?"
Wouldn't you rather have read this:
"WHATEVER has a recent story that is more science fiction than fact about the potential for drugs that slow down human perception of time to enable ENJOYABLE ACTIVITIES FOR RECREATION AND IMPROVEMENT OF OURSELVES AS A SPECIES feel longer than the normal human lifespan.
Like all good science fiction, it isn't so much about the technology as it is about the questions it provokes. Like which would be more USEFUL helping someone to IMPROVE the rest of their Unnatural lifespan LEARNING AND ENJOYING R&R or only making them feel as if THEY HAD A LONGER TIME ON EARTH FOR IMPROVEMENT AND ENJOYMENT?"
It's always fucking negative.
GUNS! PRISON! SUFFER! OBEY!
BANG BANG! DON'T DROP THE SOAP! HA HA let's make light of situations which are harmful, welcome to another shitty broadcast watch us smile unless you have the VISION to see how really EVIL we fucking are!
###
OP marked as flamebait by, imo, war-lovers/backers.