Time Dilation Drug Could Let Heinous Criminals Serve 1,000 Year Sentences 914
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Like something out of the movie Inception, Rhiannon Williams reports in the Telegraph that Dr. Rebecca Roache, in charge of a team of scholars focused upon the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment, claims the prison sentences of serious criminals could be made worse by distorting 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,' says Roache. Roache says when she began researching this topic, she was thinking a lot about Daniel Pelka, a four-year-old boy who was starved and beaten to death by his mother and stepfather.
'I had wondered whether the best way to achieve justice in cases like that was to prolong death as long as possible. Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment, and a lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying. And so I thought, why not make prison sentences for particularly odious criminals worse by extending their lives?' 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,' says Roache. '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.'"
'I had wondered whether the best way to achieve justice in cases like that was to prolong death as long as possible. Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment, and a lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying. And so I thought, why not make prison sentences for particularly odious criminals worse by extending their lives?' 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,' says Roache. '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.'"
Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's ridiculous. If we wanted to cause as much damage to the criminals as possible, why not simply reinstate torture?
That's basically what she seems to want.
(no we shouldn't do that)
More like the movie Demolition Man (Score:4, Insightful)
Like something out of the movie Inception
I just hope there aren't unintended consequences, as there were in that movie.
It will never fly in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems to be the very definition of "cruel and unusual".
Cruel and unusual punishment (Score:5, Insightful)
Barbaric (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
This. ... "and a lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying"
They didn't get out of anything, they're dead.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what I was thinking. The whole summary made me sick. Justice isn't a code word for vengence.
There's an argument to be made for execution, if someone is deemed beyond redemption, but to invent drugs to extend punishment is horrible. Unless the idea is someone can be released in a week, and become productive rather than a drain on society.
Not useful (Score:5, Insightful)
Using a time dilation drug does in lieu of actual time served does nothing to help keep them off the street.
Using a time dilation drug as well as a normal sentence amounts to psychological torture or near torture, and won't help with any corrective process which might have prevented repeat offense.
Bottom line: drugs like this have no place in or penal system, regardless of the ethical ramifications of using them on prisoners.
Oh god (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I the only the person a little disturbed that we've got scholars focused on the future of punishment coming up with shit like this? We already have ways we could make imprisonment worse, we could torture prisoners incessantly throughout their incarceration but don't because we're trying to show more humanity and restraint than those we lock up... Are they seriously dumb enough to think someone who commits a horrible crime with a 30 year sentence was going to reconsider if they could get an imaginary 60 years or 600 years? Does anyone think that injecting someone with a drug to make them feel like they are somewhere unpleasent for drastically longer is somehow not torture when injecting them with a drug that would cause them pain for a short period of time is?
I expect this kind of primal bollocks to be popular with the population at large but I'd, perhaps naively, thought that people who were informed and trying to put together a rational case would know better.
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the most objectionable story I've ever seen on Slashdot.
What about rehabilitation? (Score:5, Insightful)
We do this already (Score:5, Insightful)
A convicted felon, even once they serve their sentence, is still a pariah in the US. Their record follows them so they can't get jobs, they are shunned by society and in some cases they are put on lists so neighbors can keep their kids away from them. I think we do a pretty good job of torturing criminals for their entire lives, while we wonder why the recidivism rate is so high. As a caveat, I have to say that our "correctional" institutions probably don't do much real correction so the guys on the lists probably need a watchful eye on them.
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. This is simply inhumane. Regardless of the otrocities commited by the convicted, we cannot, as a society, debase ourselves by resorting to torture of the mind, body, or soul.
The department of corrections is supposed to be "correcting" human behaviour, not damaging it. Too much of that happens in prisons as it is. Now this doctor wants to exacerbate that?
Whatever organization that she received her doctorate from should revoke it immediately!
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not worried about this actually happening. It'd be shot down by the ECHR and at best would just give the Telegraph another reason to complain about them.
I'm more concerned that someone who calls themself a doctor could even concieve of such a thing; I'm going to have to assume that Ms Roache isn't that kind of doctor, otherwise I'm in danger of losing any lingering faith I have in the innate goodness of Man.
Re:Prison is more than punishment (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think a 1000 years punishments would do much to... rehabilitate prisoners. If anything, it'll break them beyond breaking or turn them into madmen that will be your worst enemy on they get out.
The idea of "punishment" for a crime makes little sense beyond a certain point. Sure, you want to punish behaviors as a way to reduce them (the same way we punish kids for behaving incorrectly) but there gets a point where going beyond in the scale of punishment is futile and even counter productive, specially because most of the time all you are doing is giving the satisfaction to the victims that somebody is still being punished (paying for what they did), instead of becoming a better person (which should be the aim of jail time but isn't).
And, on topic: if living for 1000 years for a normal person would usually result in worse than bad results (loss of friends, lack of usual boundaries/inhibitions because you just need to wait), never mind them being locked up (imagine watching the same place and for years at a time, following the same routine over and over again, or in the case of the drug, watching a wall for the equivalent of months at a time)... It'd take a specially strong mind to withstand that and still be functional afterwards. And it's that kind of people that you don't want locked up ever (instead you want them following the law, or for the second option, dead). If you just lock them up, they are going to hate you afterwards for it, if they don't try to escape during sentence.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:1, Insightful)
Says you. How about you test that on yourself before trying to convince us without any data to back up your claim?
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
1000 years subject time, all spent strapped to a gurney and looking at the ceiling and you think they're going to come out of it as a productive member of society? Not to mention submitting someone to 1000 years of that torture in less time than it takes for a lawyer to file an appeal, that's just a great idea for justice. I sincerely hope the author of this piece was being satirical... the alternative is that she's a raging sociopath.
Star Trek covered this (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this basically the same thing (except, you know, for actual criminals)?
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what happens when a biblical zeal for vengeance meets modern technology.
Anybody seriously contemplating using something like this should be subjected to it themselves, and is well into the end of the medical ethics of Joseph Mengele.
Even suggesting something this obscene should cause you to lose your medical license.
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:3, Insightful)
They didn't get out of anything, they're dead.
Sometimes their victims still have a lot of years left.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prison is more than punishment (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea of "punishment" for a crime makes little sense beyond a certain point.
Amen to that. Only punishments which are proven to reduce crime should ever be implemented. Even the death penalty has never been shown to do that. People don't think they will get caught, or they feel like they have no choices and their life isn't worth living anyway, so who cares if they might be killed? If murdering people for doing things we don't like isn't an effective punishment, that suggests strongly that many of the lesser punishments are ineffective as well. And if you look at our prison population, you might get the distinct impression that indeed the system is not working in the best interest of The People.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, she is an associate editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics [bmj.com],
But hopefully not for too much longer.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're saying that because you believe the accuracy of convictions is 100%. That's laughable.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet death row is filled with people desperate to exchange their impending deaths for life imprisonent.
Because there is a difference between criminals and non criminals. IIn addition, there is a whole spectrum in between.
For myself, I would prefer death to being in prison at all, for any length of time. For others, prison is just another place to live.
We're always trying to impose our own values upon others.
But to the subject at hand - The good doctor is pretty evil. Why not just beat them within an inch of their lives, then using the best medicine available, revive them in order to repeat the beatings tomorrow?
The answer is this - when the actions of the righteous are indistinguishable from the actions of the evil, the righteous and the evil are one and the same.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Currently we "rehabilitate" people by putting them in a cage with a whole bunch of other sociopaths for decades and expect them to emerge as productive members of society. In doing so, we already are cruel by removing a substantial part of their lives from them (and probably get them raped, psychologically and physically abused, etc). They can never get that time back, no matter how productive they emerge, no matter how sorry they are, no matter that they'll never do it again, or that they've already been punished by being completely removed from normal society for an extended period of time. That life "time" is gone forever.
US prison is not meant to rehabilitate. That's a fantasy that some still hold, but prison is there to punish you, nothing more. Well, it's supposed to deter you as well, but I'm not sure how well that works.
The Prison Reform Act of 1984 states "imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation." And yet, as you refer to, we expect people to come out of prison and rejoin polite society. Well, we say we expect that, but then we put up all kinds of obstacles to becoming gainfully employed as an ex-con. If you're black, you're basically unemployable after being in prison. So we lock people up in a terrible place, expect them to somehow improve themselves while there, make it hard for them to rebuild their lives once they get out, and then wonder why those people can't get their shit together. Must be something about their "culture", eh? It's one of the more fucked up aspects of our criminal justice system (right next to for-profit prisons). Really, it's absurd on an existentialist level.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:1, Insightful)
Also if you're white, red, yellow, or a fetching shade of mauve. Don't bring race into this.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
the idea that if you make someone suffer enough they will not commit any more crimes for fear of more.
I think you give the author too much credit. As I read it, it is steeped in pure lust for vengeance, no rational thought required.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Tests have already been done on countless millions of people. None of them complained about being dead, said they'd rather be doing something else, or petitioned to be made no-longer dead. Zero.
Our common sense (and some very strong instincts) tell us it's an extremely bad thing, but thousands of years of observations suggest that once it happens, nobody really cares anymore.
You've just been ignoring their complaints. They're screaming in pain in various haunted houses.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:2, Insightful)
1000 years subject time, all spent strapped to a gurney and looking at the ceiling
False assumptions on your part. One doesn't have to be strapped to a gurney for these drugs to be effective.
submitting someone to 1000 years of that torture
Confinement isn't torture.
Apparently you need a course in reading comprehension.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:2, Insightful)
Rehabilitation is a code word for "I don't like punishing people for what they have done"
Realize that some people are just fucking wired wrong (insert nature/nurture argument here). There is no Rehabilitation for some. There are some in the "Rehabilitation" camp that even suggest that lifetime incarceration is "cruel and unusual" punishment. Why anyone listens to these people is in itself is nuts.
For me, you would have to prove that the expenditure of money to "Rehabilitate" someone has any sort of payoff. And I am pretty sure there is no such payoff. We shouldn't waste any more money on housing humans who have done horrible things than we have to. They are a drain on society,
On the flip side, we shouldn't be jailing people for "crimes" that have harmed nobody. It is now an imprisonable offense to have things that make illegal things, even if you don't have any of the illegal items.
In the meantime, we have Federal agencies disobeying a Restraining order to get a customer list of a gun shop who was not doing anything illegal, simply because it "MIGHT" be illegal at some point in the future.
Meanwhile, people are too fucking concerned about Beyonce's latest video.
Prevention and Protection over Punishment (Score:4, Insightful)
I do not believe in punishment. I feel that punishment is the victim's mantra. I feel that a government's first job is the prevention of crime.
One theory is that harsh punishment will prevent crime, as if some jealous person will consider that when they find their spouse in bed with someone else, or some poor staving person or meth-addicted person will consider that before robbing a store, or after the police still won't do anything about the neighbors they will just think of the punishment before they just let bygones be bygones.
Instead we ask our police officers, our lawyers, our scientists, and intimately, we ask our lawmakers to be our agents for revenge.
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:4, Insightful)
One advantage of having closure is that it greatly reduces the challenges the victim faces going forward.
Some of those reductions in challenges are warranted. Some of those reductions are not.
We, as a society, endorse the concept of innocent victimization: if someone is made to suffer at the hands of another, the sufferer ought not have any further social obligation. For the most part, that's fair.
However, life can never be made completely fair, and I argue it should not be. If such were the case, we would not require any higher level of mental functioning than simple seeking and avoidance behaviors. There would be no point to sophisticated problem-solving, as there would be no complex problems that needed solving. Natural selection seems to favor some species developing higher skills of reasoning, which could indicate that this is an expected consequence of our form of life in our environment. Genetics also provides little incentive to reduce gradual increases in complexity that aren't strictly necessary; indeed, one of the resultant characteristics of this is diversity of life, which as a whole seems to promote the continuance of life in general in an ever-changing environment.
I cannot pretend to empathize with most of the suffering in the world, particularly the more severe forms, but I can say that personally, most of the suffering I have experienced has been challenges providing opportunities for personal growth. I did not always see things this way. I do not want this to read as an endorsement of mild forms of suffering, but merely as a reason to not try to eliminate completely nor balance absolutely the unfairness inherent in the human condition.
There is something to be said for the psychological benefit of having some degree of closure. I do not believe lawmakers should try to enforce the maximum possible closure. I favor the idea of rehabilitation of criminals; in the cases where re-entry to society would be irreducably dangerous, such as strong cases of sociopathy or impaired functioning resulting from traumatic brain injury or genetic predisposition, I would tend to favor restrictions of mobility and physical functioning only as necessary to prevent most of the possible social damage. These restrictions would, to the extent possible, scale inversely with the level to which a criminal seeks to maximize their benefit to society.
Note that, by rehabilitation, I do not wish to imply sudden and unsupervised social re-entry. Rehabilitation is a tricky game that human culture has only begun to play with a modest level of success.
In other words, closure oughtn't be absolute, rehabilitation should be sought when possible, and where it is not possible, an individual's pursuit to integrate with society should influence the degree of their confinement.
Of course, this could all be a crock of shit. I haven't done any deep research into the statistics of recidivism to support my point of view.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Tests have already been done on countless millions of people. None of them complained about being dead, said they'd rather be doing something else, or petitioned to be made no-longer dead. Zero."
That's really beside the point. The big problem here is that Dr. Roache seems to think that the primary purpose of incarceration is to "punish" people. Nonsense.
While punishment as an incentive to prevent re-offense might have some value, statistics and what we know of psychology say that really doesn't work very well.
Society's main interest, when it comes to incarcerating physically dangerous people, is to lock them up so that they don't continue to cause societal damage (rape, injury, murder, etc.). From a societal standpoint, "punishment" is (and should be) far from the first consideration. It just isn't that important.
For more minor offenders, punishment might be more of a consideration. But at the same time, torturing minor offenders probably isn't a good idea.
Which leaves us with: harsh punishment just isn't that important. Keeping them away from society is.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
To expand here. I've been mugged. The kids who did it certainly need help, and that help can't just be someone giving them some money or other soft response, but longterm incarceration won't do anyone any favors. It won't help them, it won't help me, it won't help our criminal system costs, and it won't make the neighborhood safer.
What they need is a system that requires them to accept responsibility for their actions and to make restitutions for them so they don't feel guilty for life. That's called restorative justice.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:4, Insightful)
"This is because the punishment is not severe enough to discourage him from pursuing his career."
No, it isn't. We have a century of solid research, evidence and data to say so. Punishment just isn't a very good deterrent.
I didn't say it's NOT a deterrent. And I didn't say we shouldn't punish. But it's not a very good deterrent of re-offense. We know this.
On the other hand, as somebody pointed out above: it might be a good deterrent against someone else committing the same crime. So there's that.
Re: Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I do believe in rehabilitation, but only for minor offenses, where someone goes "astray". As for things like rape, robbery and murder ... not so much.
Why?
And the problem is that there are always matters of degree. Walking into a mall and shooting 20 people is a different crime than killing somebody with your hands after they invaded your home and grappled and tried to strangle you. Shoplifting is a different crime than holding somebody up at gunpoint. Grabbing a woman off the street and raping her is a different crime than sleeping with your girlfriend without getting a signed consent form.
I think that rehabilitation MUST be a higher priority because doing anything else endangers the public unless the criminal is locked away for life. What good is sending somebody to prison for 10 years if they rape somebody else after they get out? Better to spend 3 years, or 30 years, rehabilitating them so that when they do get out the public is safe.