Using Drugs to Distort Prison Service

[DasFapital]

Future biotechnology could be used to trick a prisoner's mind into thinking they have served a 1,000 year sentence, a group of scientists have claimed.

Philosopher Rebecca Roache is in charge of a team of scholars focused upon the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment. Dr Roache claims the prison sentence of serious criminals could be made worse by extending their lives.

Speaking to Aeon magazine, Dr Roache said drugs could be developed to distort prisoners' minds into thinking time was passing more slowly.

"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," she said.

A second scenario would be to upload human minds to computers to speed up the rate at which the mind works, she wrote on her blog.

"If the speed-up were a factor of a million, a millennium of thinking would be accomplished in eight and a half hours... Uploading the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time."

Thirty years in prison is currently the most severe punishment available in the UK legal system.

"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."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10697529/Prisoners-could-serve-1000-year-sentence-in-eight-hours.html

[Slavic]

"Philosopher Rebecca Roache is in charge of a team of scholars focused upon the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment. Dr Roache claims the prison sentence of serious criminals could be made worse by extending their lives."

Not based on fact, just philosophical musings. I love science fiction but I don't beleive that science fiction will become our future.

[TC]

Radical life extension and mind uploading (the later being, I think, something that should be recognized as both the death of the organic person and the creation of an inorganic person with an identical mind) if possible could benefit people and society immeasurably. The notion that they could be used to inflict more severe punishments should be seen as just another example of the way technology can be abused in the wrong hands and greater technology allows for greater coercive control.

[Skyhilist]

How stupid. What is the utility of making someone think they've been imprisoned longer? This would only make sense if more time in prison equaled more "rehabilitation" and a decrease in anti-social behavior (which many prisoners have never even displayed in the first place). But being in prison longer doesn't change the mindset of most prisoners so that they become better people, in fact it usually just makes them more hostile. If you take a murderer, trick them into thinking they've served 1,000 years, and then release them, they're just going to be more likely to commit anti-social crimes. I'm really not seeing any utility to this at all. The only argument that can be made is a moral one of "they deserve to be in prison for 1,000" years, which is ridiculous, because no one deserves that.

[blake 3:17]

The idea is absolutely repulsive and immoral. This interview with her pretty interesting:

http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/should-biotech-make-life-hellish-for-criminals/

The most challenging part in it might be this:


And more importantly, we have to ask ourselves whether punishments like imprisonment are only considered humane because they are familiar, because we’ve all grown up in a world where imprisonment is what happens to people who commit crimes. 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?