Biotechnology could make prisoners serve 1,000 year sentence in eight hours
If you thought Black Mirror was just an exciting TV show. Think again. That shits about to become a documentary if this idea comes to fruition!
It is often said that prisoners don't serve the maximum amount of prison time they deserve. Even a 'life' sentence doesn't actually mean 'life', but what if there was a drug that could trick the prisoners mind into thinking they've been locked up for 1,000 years?! Philosopher Rebecca Roache, along with her team are looking at ways futuristic technologies could make punishment totally unbearable, hence more effective.
Dr Roache claims the prison sentence could be made worse by extending a prisoners life. Obviously this would only be used with the most serious criminals, not some dude who took 20 quid from a charity bucket. Dr Roache said that drugs could be developed to distort prisoners' minds into thinking time was passing more slowly. She said:
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.
A second scenario would be to upload human minds to computers to speed up the rate at which the mind works. 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.
Currently, the maximum sentence in the UK in 30 years, but Dr Roache wants to make this feel much much longer:
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.
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.
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?
I mean yeah, I guess it's a good idea in theory but this Redditor made a good point about why it might not be so effective.
Then again, on the flip side, this dude made a valid point about the fragility.
It's certainly not going to be as straight-forward and drugging prisoners and they come skipping out as changed men. Shits about to get very very dark!
