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Time Dilation Drug Could Let Heinous Criminals Serve 1,000 Year Sentences
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.'"
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)
Have you ever looked at your handcuffs? I mean, really LOOKED at them?
rewriting history since 2109
"Thirty years in prison is currently the most severe punishment available in the UK legal system."
No, it's not. People get 30-year minimum sentences, for instance, and there are a number of prisoners on whole-life sentences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Sounds like the drug "pulse" described by sci-fi writer Walter Mosley in the book Futureland. Worth a read.
Like something out of the movie Inception
I just hope there aren't unintended consequences, as there were in that movie.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
This seems to be the very definition of "cruel and unusual".
Imprisoning criminals is trying to do a few things:
* punishment for the criminal
* deterrent for would-be criminals
* protecting the public from re-offence
* rehabilitation of prisoners
Drugs could be used in all these areas?
IS she looking to abolish the 18th amendment and the universal declaration of human rights
This is the problem with specialization and non-communication of important findings from one specialty to another.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Justice is not an eye for an eye. Justice is not torture. Justice is not becoming what you seek to destroy.
Probably the worst form of torture and guaranteed death possibly inflicted on a human?
Seriosuly
What the fuck. As a previous poster mentioned this is tantamount to torture.
Iain M Banks takes this to the extreme in Surface Detail. You could have indefinite suffering for almost eternity - as long as your civilisation works on accelerated time.
No its not.
You can be sentenced to a whole life tariff which means you will never be released.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prisoners_with_whole-life_tariffs Gives a list of some criminals under this sentence.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/feb/26/lee-rigby-killers-michael-adebolajo-adebowale-whole-life-ruling
His accomplice, Michael Adebowale, 22, who stabbed at the soldier's torso, was ordered to serve a minimum of 45 years in jail. Both men had been convicted unanimously by a jury in December.
The foremost point of prison is to keep bad individuals where they can't harm the general populace, and to punish them for their actions, with the hope that they will correct their behavior.
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.
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.
What was her name again? ;) Are you sure she not advocating both? Maybe she's seen the latest Judge Dredd movie.
The Outer Limits (1995-2002), Season 2 episode 22, "The Sentence"
Why should we waste money on people who obviously have chosen not to abide by the simple rules of society. It's not as if not stealing, murdering or raping are new concepts.
We as a society no longer have the time or resources to continue to coddle criminals. Recidivists should not constantly be leeching off the public dole with free room and board.
Removing these people from society has multiple benefits including not having to worry if they're going to commit another, more violent, crime, not having to house and feed them for years at a time and if we're really lucky, taking them out of the gene pool so they can't reproduce.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This woman sounds like a pyscho. I wonder what is in Dr. Rebecca Roache's past that makes her think she can redefine "justice" along these lines? This is almost Lovecraftian in its evil.
What about rehabilitation? Sure some people do bad things, really bad things. But putting them on drugs to make a sentence seem longer isn't going to make them better members of society when they eventually get out. Solitary confinement also makes things seem longer, but eventually they get out and they go right on doing what they did before, because you didn't fix the underlying problem. If you just want them in jail for as long as possible, and don't strive to rehabilitate them, you might as well invoke the death penalty. The point of the justice system shouldn't be just to punish people, but rehabilitate them so they can be more useful members of society.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
There is a drug called SloMo used to do something just like this.
Instead of a year in prison, you serve a month with time dialation. Save the prison money of keeping you, while still getting the punishment.
Perhaps use this type of drug to allow a prisoner to serve their twenty year sentence in considerably less "real time". That way they still serve their time and can get out young enough to attempt to contribute to society. I would think that the threat of a 1000 year sentence would scare the crap out of at least some criminals, though not all.
What the fuck is wrong with these people? Researching new ways to torture people should get your medical license removed.
Subjective time (your experience of time) is not measurable, so the entire premise of this article doesn't make sense. You can't tell 20 minutes from 21 minutes without a clock, or five days from six days without light cues. Drugs can alter your experience of time, but not in the way suggested. You won't experience one year of being doped up as a hundred years, but as one year of being doped up.
Justice isn't about revenge and not even about punishment. Though I see how you could make that mistake in the police state you live in. It's about removing someone who's an ongoing threat to society until such time as they are no longer a threat to society. The fact that it's so often used for revenge and for enslaving entire generations of otherwise-peaceful drug users is an indication that your society is broken. Someone who would come up with an idea like this sounds just as evil as the people they envision punishing. Sure, let's take helpless people under our control and torture them for what seems like an eternity. That's brilliant.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Let's fuck up already fucked-up persons more. Way to go civilized society.
Someone stop the world, I want to get off here.
Why, yes! I AM new here.
We really want to focus on more punishment and less rehabilitation?
"Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment"
No. Dr. Rebecca Roache's sense of -revenge- requires this. Emotions have fuck all to do with -justice-. Brain tinkering to dilute time ffs. Perhaps Rebecca needs to watch some Clockwatch Orange.
It is a sad thing indeed that with a drug that could allow someone to experience a sensation and emotion for a thousand years, this person's first thoughts turned to how to use the drug for punishment and misery.
Load me up a syringe, I'm off to the tropics with all the ones I love.
What about trying to reform them? Or are we giving up on fellow human beings and treat their actions as something inherent in themselves?
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!
RE: Same topic (for context)
@ http://soylentnews.org/article...
This is too obnoxious for Ig Nobel, we need a new prize ... how about the Mengele award?
According to current tendency in penalization of crimes this is what I expect in the future:
1 day sentence, but of course it will feel like 1000 years. This will make world safer place, won't it?
What a monster. Let's make an experiment where we put this Dr. Rebecca Roache behind bars in a normal fashion for just 1 year without any fancy drugs, and she'd be surprised how long and uncomfortable even that time will feel.
So this is some random scientist doing a thought experiment that's already been done in thousands of scifi books for the past 100 years or so. It's equivalent to saying "Some time in the future, we could fly criminals to another planet and use it as a penal colony!" Ok, yea, I read that book... so why is this news? If we're just making up technology that doesn't exist how about a pill that makes them not want to commit crimes?
Use this pill on Friday night and make the weekend seem like it last for 5 years instead of 20 minutes.
Maybe I could give it to my spouse before sex.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
takes out the media centered fear hate & violence features which are obsoletely fatal & based on histories of hysterical generational abuse
Am I the only one of thinking about the manga Bleach and the Espada battle?
I read time dilation and immediately thought about how much more i could get done today with that drug.
This whole prison thing seems like an odd deviation from what should be the real topic.
I agree that extending a prison sentence seems a little barbaric. But what about looking at this from a pure cost-saving viewpoint? Instead of sentencing a prisoner to 10 years (or whatever is normal for their offense) and keeping them in prison that long, use the drug and keep them in prison for only one year but make them feel like 10 years have passed. Huge cost savings to the public, right there.
Surely instead of lengthening the actual sentece, you could say, make a prisoners perception of 15 minutes last 15 years, therefore rehabilitating them with a pill. Of course I'm only musing, it is of course a rediculous concept.
sudo apt-get install sl && sl
While reading this article, I find it hard to believe that "Roache says when she began researching this topic, she was thinking a lot about Daniel Pelka". Not to insult the inspiration, but it seems like a lot of other sci-fi related shows have already covered this. The one that is on the top of my mind is "Star Trek: Deep Space 9" ("Hard Time", Season 2, Episode 25) where Miles O'Brien's mind has been altered to create memories of being incarcerated for 20 years on an alien world on charges of espionage and sedition.
Isn't this basically the same thing (except, you know, for actual criminals)?
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
-- kp
“Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years." As author Joseph Heller's Dunbar character saw it, the more miserable you are, the slower time passes, and the longer (relatively) you live.
Gently reply
If you read between the lines, it's implied that one could do a 10 year sentence in a fraction of the time, possibly with earlier rehabilitation and a chance to live out the rest of their life.
However, if the drugs are shown to impede the cognitive change that needs to happen for rehabilitation, then this would have no practical or moral application.
Does this pill mean I'll have my very own clone of Kirsten Dunst in her undies jumping on my bed while smokin' some weed?
She ripped off the idea from pretty much every sci fi show ever. Why not just have the prison orbit a black hole?
A lot of the reactions in this thread seem to be the knee-jerk reactions feared by the author.
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?
I think this is an interesting idea. What if someone commits a crime at age 25, gets 50 years of punishment. We give them the drug, the serve 5 actual years, but it feels like 50 for them. Their one and only life has not been taken away from them, but they've been forced to spend 50 years thinking about what they'd done. Kind of like an adult time-out. An interview can be done to see if the person really was rehabilited at the end of the 5 years, and if not, they serve out the ACTUAL 50 years like normal. Sounds like a win to me. 1000 year sentences truly is abusive/torture and a dumb idea, but there are good ways to apply this technology.
Say someone was wrongly convicted, are the effects reversible?
All discussion of crime and punishment seems to assume a certain infallibility in the system of conviction. That is an incorrect assumption as has been proven time and again and again and again.
The most chilling part however is that the technology is likely here and now. It's use in the justice system is unlikely in the near-term. HOWEVER, that doesn't prevent it's use in more covert systems of punishment and persuasion.
Now a suspect can undergo torture for what seems like ... eternity.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
"The Sentence" is about the creator of a time dilation prison simulation getting stuck inside it accidentally.
Do we really need to get every goddamn piece of 1984 implemented?
Maybe she can focus on why people do these things to start with and work on technology that can prevent these occurences? Our beef is with the crime itself and the damage it do? I think Roache missed the larger point.
It could result in people serving short sentences, like a year or so, in much less time. Normal punishment, served in shortened time, could lead to less disruption.
Usually people do not just come right out and admit that they are evil unless they're cartoon characters.
The idea that somebody with "Dr." in front of their name would even think of "punishment" as a desirable concept is profoundly disgusting.
This is incredibly evil..
Perhaps we could scan their mental pattern, upload their conciousness to a computer, and make them spend eternity in a simulated Hell.
RIP Iain Banks.
1) Give it to my girlfriend
2) Make love for two whole minutes
3) Sleep happily
Where is Judge Dredd when we need him?
Okay, so we seem to only be looking at this from the angle of extending punishment. But what about the possibility of using these to reduce the physical time people actually spent in jail. It could reduce prison overcrowding, along with the cost. It could also allow people to return to society while they're still young. For example, say someone got a 30 yr sentence at age 40. In many instances, this would be the equivalent of a death sentence for that person. If they could be given a drug that effectively turned 5 years into the virtual 30, they now are released at age 45, and saved the penal system 25 years of cost.
Just another day in Paradise
2 Peter 3:8 - But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day [is] with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
I agree. Why not just torture them to death and be done with it. You are on no higher moral ground for doing it virtually using drugs.
In the end, it comes down to what a society feels is important to do about crime and "justice".
1) Punishment
2) Rehab
3) Isolation
The article seems to say that for odious crimes, only punishment is the answer. I think most enlightened societies would probably agree, that the purpose is to keep criminals isolated from the rest of society until such a time as they can be re-integrated back into society as a productive member. In some rare cases, where they crime is so odious, it might be best for society as a whole to keep them isolated from society for the rest of their life.
You don't want to be in prison for these types of punishment.
"Oh, you're in prison because you let your 5 yr old starve to death and mistreated him?", expect hell from everyone!
We should be killing violent criminals end of story. Eradicate the evil. It isn't an issue of punishment. Prison is torture. Certain crimes constitute forfeiture of a right to live on this earth. No more thug life.
This is like the season premier for Sick Sad World
-- Sig under construction...
Lets not ever, forced medical procedures are wrong at the deepest levels. The UK has a history of offing things like this, chemical castration of Allen Turning and other gays (I know it was "voluntary" as in do this or got to jail) and it's frankly abdominal.
No sir I dont like it.
So, I get the world is a terrible place sometimes, but if we're not actually going to strive to become something better, something more than we are in nature, then what is the point again? When can we stop being a punishment oriented culture and become a reward oriented one? You know, that whole carrot & stick thing?
Though, I still don't necessarily see rehabilitation being feasible in some select scenarios, but for those exceptional situations we have the utility of removing an individual from participation. In these situations you aren't punishing an individual, but solving an _active_ societal problem for the community when actual harm is being, or has been done.
There is a truth here that can be seen on much smaller time scales. People change, and grow from their experiences. A person at 18 has spent the most significant portions of his life as a kid, and experienced at most a few short years of adulthood. If you were to ignore that and just say he had 18 years.... he will have 18 years of experience 4 times over before he dies on average.
A person doesn't need 900 years to change.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
This story is ridiculous. Aside from all the ethical aspects - which are important - the whole idea that somebody will serve 1000 years just because we've drugged them is fallacious. They aren't going to experience 1000 years of prison; they will just feel as if time is moving really slowly for a few weeks. We have no innate sense of time and are very dependent on the environment for cues as to how much time has passed. Things like day and night, meals, bathroom breaks, etc. will quickly give lie to the idea that a 1000 year term is being served, even to the most drugged up prisoner. This is just bad science fiction coupled with vengeance fantasies.
We could just do like that one episode of Star Trek where any rule broken results in death. Wonder how that would change things, would society become eutopia like in the show or a dystopian police state.
Nah, thats too gay. If you are going to push for some degrading and painful death, go for the real deal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphism
You mistakenly assert the goal is punishment, it is not although that is an effect. The goal is rehabilitation and removing criminal actors from society while they are in an active phase of transgression to protect the general population from predators and criminal actions and to prevent retaliation and providing redress for victims.
On a related note PCP can produce an effect of time dilation that is extremely unpleasant where minutes seem to be hours, it is extremely unpleasant and could easily lead to nervous collapse and insanity, perhaps not the effect you are looking for if you are humane and ever plan on releasing the perpetrator. Brain injury and physical trauma can also produce a similar effect.
Reminds me more of DS9's Hard Time.
Why not use it on people that don't have long to live and want to live longer?
Does the Mrs. Williams not understand the Eighth Amendment?
Even aside from the constitutional issue, there are ethical arguments against such a course.
Plus not everyone agrees that the primary purpose of our criminal justice system is punishment and retribution. Clearly there is no protection of society aspect to this. Nor, unless I missed something, is there any rehabilitation aspect.
Dilating time was first nature to my mother. Compared to her sermons, 1000 years strapped to a gurney would seen like a vacation.
I'm curious though; are you on board with surgical rehabilitation so long as it doesn't include torture?
Because that's cruel and unusual punishment, you fucking psychopath. This is the sort of shit serial killers come up with. I'm now considering starting a petition to compel psychiatric care for this ass clown.
at first I thought prohibition was a GOOD thing! people were drinking more and having a good time but without alcohol prohibition just doesn't work...
What a fucking douche.
Why not fucking extend life for a GOOD purpose rather than punishment?
This is for people whom society has deemed beyond correction. They should never be allowed to reenter society, so we must decide what to do with them. The only logical sentences in this case are life imprisonment without parole, or death.
What the author proposes is just sick.
I'm sure after 10 years on a drug like that they'd come out perfectly sane and able to deal with a normal perception of the passage of time.
Death sentence is the harshest sentence there is and it is cost effective. Heavy fines could also work for many cases (economic "slavery" / poverty).
Mental health considerations should be totally taken out of the court room.
Long-term torture is just inhuman and rather painless death is merciful.
Torture and damaging prisoners on purpose is rather inhuman and should be avoided. Prisoners are not mentally-ill - especially for crimes that are not planned. Crimes without much planning "just happens" (like it or not) it is difficult to prevent such crimes using heavier and heavier punishments (but they are still serious crimes and require punishment).
Civilized people do not support vengeance or torture.
This would make a great element in a sci-fi action. Of course, the people responsible for inventing and administering this drug would be the villains, and even us law abiding, never-want-to-be-in-a-fight civilian types would be cheering their inevitably bloody and painful deaths.
Every person in the country be asked if this is a good idea. Anyone that thinks this is a good idea be immediately placed under psychiatric observation for 30 days.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Think of positives: You could spend a month traveling through Europe and not have to burn any vacation.
Why not use it differently? If you commit a crime and the crime would normally be punished by a 30 year prison sentence, they could put you in a room and give you 30 years' worth of sentence in 2 years. You'd still think you'd been imprisoned for 30 years but would cost 1/15th.
What about other uses?
If the effects are immediate and stop completely after, say, 2 hours/miligram. Sign me and my girlfriend up! If anything could make my 45-second erection seem like 30 minutes to both of us, I'd use it.
This would fall under 'cruel and unusual punishment' and be illegal.
The Democraps will love it and implement it starting tomorrow.
Obama will gladly sign it into law.
>Justice isn't a code word for vengeance.
For many it is exactly that. It is the only way they are allowed to hurt people they hate so they push it to the limit. The ones who think that way most probably go into the justice system where they can be personally involved in expressing it.
In Joe Haldeman's SF novel 'Buying Time'(previously called 'The Long Habit of Living')
there's a drug called zombie with the effect of rendering a person catatonic while speeding up their perception of time a thousandfold.
So in effect while people are incapacitated for a few days, it feels like 20 years. And some can handle it and some can't.
Good read.
This is about future societies. There was a time when we speculated about what our current policies meant for a far future society. These far futures have a way of creeping up on us, as did 1984 and the new millennium.
We take many of our current policies for granted and assume they are on an ideological high ground.
There was a time when killing the offspring of your enemy was once the moral thing to do. Arranged marriages were more common. Eight year old children once worked in factories. People still are thrown in jail for years for minor offences.
If we look at our current penal system, and what it moving towards, it's not that ethical. For one, private companies run most jails and they are motivated by profit, not rehabilitation. There are arguments on both sides of the capital punishment debate and each side holds apparently contrary thoughts on related subjects such as euthanasia and abortion. Now I'm not stating agreement with any particular side on the issue of punishment, but I think we should speculate. Speculations such as these, though they are otherwise useless, at least open the debate about our current system.
This was one of the effects of the drug in the recent Judge Dredd movie.
This is going to be used to get really long working days out of people.
Imagine doing 1000 hour days!
Same thing are the criminals.
Something else to have dystopian nightmares about. That's the sickest shit I've read in quite a while.
We're already keeping prisoners alive via force-feeding them in Gitmo, just so we can keep punishing them forever. Why make it seem like it lasts 10x as long?
I don't want to live on the same planet as the woman quoted in the article.
First, this is an incredibly evil idea. Why would we dedicate any more time and money to these people? When does inventing new forms of torture tax society more than the criminals?
Second, a good gut check for the consideration of new tools for the government is this: "How will this be abused?" I think the implications here speak for themselves.
Finally, What gives you the right to inflict these kinds of hypothetical punishment? When have you become worse than the criminal that you're punishing? This post is ethically disgusting.
Common Sense (+1)
If you want to inflict pain, just go back to plain old torture. Taking someone who already committed a heinous crime, subjecting them to 1,000 virtual years of imprisonment, and then setting them free at age 30 or whatever is just going to make them *more* psychopathic than they started out, and give them more time to do something with it.
Personally, while I'm opposed to the death penalty on general idealistic principles (not that it's wrong to take a life, but that the jury system is too imperfect for it to feel confident doling out a permanent sentence that can't be revoked)... I think death penalties have their purpose. Some people can't be reformed. They're permanent psychopaths with a history of egregious crimes against the lives and psyches of others. You can either lock them up in supermax solitary for decades until they die, or you can just cut the process short, save a lot of money, and kill them. The latter is probably preferable for all involved. If you think the death penalty is an escape from punishment for some, then perhaps you should lobby for the creation of death sentences that include a period of torture before execution (e.g. daily waterboarding for a few years or something).
Dolores Umbridge?
The original article is here, which was obviously not read.
The question asked of Roache was a continuation of a thread about radical life extension, where people are expected to live 1,000 years or more, where Roache has already argued that denying convicts access to life-extending treatments would probably be considered inhumane, and also that it would be like punishing a series of completely different people for the crime of one.
The interviewer then asks:
To which Roache replies:
.
Through the entire piece, Roache argues for proportional and reasonable punishment, and finishes with the amazingly sensible:
.
I may be expecting more of Slashdotters than they're actually able to deliver, but seriously, imagine a two physical day session at a rehabilitation center that, in the criminal's mind, was a 5 virtual year punitive sentence followed by 3 virtual years of training/rehab. Costs of maintaining imprisonment and reintegration of ex-cons into society is significantly reduced. Prison "culture" is eliminated, because there's no longer any concurrency.
"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."
How would we be any better than them if we fucked around in their head to mess with their perception of time? People who do such things are not bad, they're sick because no person in their right mind would ever do something so fucked up. How about working towards solutions to understanding the brain enough to fix such behavior? I'm sorry, but we have no clue of what 1000 years would be like, how could we when most of us live to be 70ish? What she is suggesting is worse than their crime. Maybe she should go stay in prison for the next 10 or 20 years and then reconsider her fucked up views.
If we want to prevent crime like that we should start trying to understand how their minds became so warped in the first place and prevent it before birth. My old man served 27.5 years in fed for a string of bank and armored car robberies back in the 80's and on the day he was released his term was six months longer than I was alive. He's free, but it's too late, he's institutionalized and it's only a matter of time before he goes back because of our flawed justice system. They prepared him for public reintegration 3 months before he was released when in truth they should have been doing it for 27.5 years.
It's people like her who prioritize punishment over rehabilitation that our system is in the state that it is today.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com...
Destroying Slashdot One Article At A Time!
Well, thinking about it, it IS the solution for countries with few resources and many prisioners. Instead 10 years in prision, just one feeling like 10. It would be great for public treasure. It will reduce HIV incidende among populations with high rates of male encarcerations. And since public costs would be reduced, less money could be used to make better prisions, more educational oriented and with no superpopulation (as it happens here in Brazil).
this is the most putrid, yet funny thing i have read in ages.
.. they are even more psychotic?
Also, torture is uncool, and this would be torture.
There was a scifi short story about this very thing dealing with teleportation. I forget the title and author...
More like an episode of Deep Space Nine.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If so, then by all means go for it. However, there's no correlation between criminal rehabilitation and time spent in prison. As many have said on here before, this is just an excuse to increase the suffering on the criminal without increasing the burden on taxpayers.
I never knew there were such simple-minded folks on Slashdot.
These drugs could not only be used to punish, they could also be used to make rehab feel even longer and have a considerably more effective result due to that.
It doesn't even need to be punishment.
There is no black and white to things. Stop being so binary about things damn it. It is bad enough computers are shit and STILL in binary when balanced ternary is better in every single possible way and can easily be created with current tech.
They could also be used, in the right way, to make holidays seem longer, or create a negative version of it that actually makes things feel less, so hospital stays could be less suffering for patients.
Everybody is jumping on the horribleness of the proposal, nobody seems to be catching the very obvious: it's the wrong topic for a prison reformer.
I have to skim a lot of headlines myself - just reading the 1 sentence about the 4-year-old gives me willies; for all my liberal values and intellectual knowledge about death penalty as a surprisingly poor deterrent, I want evil vengeance on such animals myself. But it's folly to obsess on these cases, and this lady has terrible priorities.
We have very few needs for more awful punishments; while these disgusting cases do come up, they're very, very rare compared to the millions of less-serious crimes that cost the state huge sums to punish with current prisons.
If you want a great slashdot techie solution, you'll love this article in The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
from a few years back about "imprisonment" with heavy use of the ankle-trackers that rule over your life. It points out that most of the people who commit most of the crimes that have the US prison system so huge are people with poor impulse control, bad habits, and bad companions. The ankle tracker can be configured to let them go to work, go home, not be off-path for more than minutes without police response, and importantly, out of the bars and the wrong parts of town. For quite a lot of the prison population, they could be paying a few payroll taxes that compensate for their $4K costs of monitoring and parole, instead of costing us as much as keeping a kid in Harvard (nearly every prisoner is $50K/year).
We may already be unaware that simple solitary confinement is something like the time-dilation drug, that it constitutes torture in its own right: ...torture that reduced Hezbollah hostage Terry Anderson to methodically smashing his head into a wall in a suicide attempt after about 18 solid months of it. He spent 7 years as a hostage in total, and could describe his mind slipping away every time they took him away from other prisoners and subjected him to solitary. John McCain wrote :
http://www.newyorker.com/repor...
“It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was
beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of
having an arm broken again.
So we're already doing THAT. It's horrible enough for about 99.999% of the worst of the worst. Can we focus on something cheaper and actually more effective for about 50% of the least of the worst and save a few dozen billion a year?
Could use this drug to administer 10-30 year sentences in 1-3 years real time. Not only do you serve it, but you also have a big chunk of your biological life left to be useful to the society.
But why not just call ourselves "God" and be done with it?
This woman is just giving over-the-top ideas about what "could happen in the future". The "story" is no different than what you and your friends might come up with after a bit of weed.
Torture. Is. Bad.
Can we use that for work or studying? I mean, I could do read a book in few seconds, review large code projects in seconds, heck, probably read whole university curriculum in minutes.
Million times dilatation would mean that each second is about 11.6 hours, so if you have a 60FPS monitor, you could show new page of text on each frame and have 4.6 hours time to process each.. Though you'd probably lose an hour waiting for the pixels to transition.. Plus you could miss a few pages if your eyes were not focused when the process started. But what the hell, just read every book three times in a row. Repetition is the mother of all learning, they say.
There is a fine line between justice and revenge. But my oppinion is that jail time should only be for purpetrators that cannot function in society else it is just revenge.
We want drug dealers in jail not for revenge but because they are dangerous and could keep on selling drugs and killing people. We want murderers of the street for the sam reason. But sending a person that steals because they are hungry is nothing more than revenge and should simply not happen.
Honnestly we live in an enlightened society is there no better way to rehabilitate criminals. We know that once you go to jail you will just end up there again.
Oh yea, living a long time is MUCH worse then dieing /rolleyes. Having someone sit in jail for 100 years only makes the victim (or family of victim) feel better. Should have different executions depending on what the crime is. Guy rapes and murders a girl, execution by baseball bats till dead, something less gruesome, just a shot to the head.
All this "death is the easy way out of punishment" is stupid, it is like people rather die then sit in a jail cell, watch TV, use exercise yard, and many other things they give to prisoners. I rather see those lifetime prisoners executed and save millions in taxpayer money.
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
--Nietzsche
The article makes it sound like she's the head of some team of scientists actually working on how to make this happen. Maybe philosophy journalism is actually worse than science journalism.
If you look at her other posts she doesn't seem to be a complete nutter.
Behind the facade of someone who claims to seek justice
there is an evil person who takes pleasure in vengeance
which is performed under the guise of legitimacy.
Saying that punishment is BS is no more plausible than saying that rehabilitation is BS. What are you rehabilitating when someone clearly knows right from wrong, and commits a crime anyhow? This is where punishment is appropriate. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
Orson Scott Card explored this idea 30+ years ago in the short story A Thousand Deaths.
Punishment should not be to exact revenge - it should be the minimum necessary to likely prevent the convicted from again causing the sort of harm he caused. Humane incarceration achieves that in cases of traditional crime (theft, murder, etc.) Chemical castration may achieve that for a rapist. A "scarlet letter" may achieve that for someone convicted of fraud.
If you're going to sentence someone to 1000 years (literally or by drug induced perception) for a crime that is obviously heinous - you might as well just execute them.
BTW: Get your coat hanger pendant - just a small donation ($10) to Ye Olde Abortion Clinic..
Why bother with the criminals, our weekends could last for days with this drug.
It's called "a job".... :(
I get it, but that's no excuse. You're right, though, that it's hardly the only consideration.
Since the point of this article was to bring up crazy ideas to reevaluate our current systems, why we use them, and what we might do instead - I have a crazy proposal for evaluation. This isn't something that I know will work, but something I'd like to see thought through. It does have a controversial aspect.
There has already been some research done into treating crime like an epidemic. Why not study it like an addiction? People participate in both because they get something out of it emotionally. They are less likely to feel shame and reform if their peers/family accept the behavior. They both breed distrust for societal norms which disapprove of the behavior, socially isolating them from those who might help.
So, how do we deal with addiction? It's not easy to do, but it is something that we have made progress with over the years. Locking people up in rehab for a period of time does help. But it is wholly insufficient on it's own. One of the best ways to quit is some type of 12-step-like program. Criminals today are told that they cannot associate with other felons, as a condition of their parole. This makes sense, but is it really the best way? What if there was an semi-anonymous sponsor program? Felons helping felons to stay out of jail by staying straight?
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
The time an offender is locked away is not just for punishment -- it is also to assure victims and targets they are safe, so they can get on with and repair their lives. You would need to give the time-dilation drugs to the victims outside the prison, so they can subjectively spend the years it takes to heal the trauma and feel safe again.
The idea of making an evil bastard serve a 1000 year sentence sounds like a clever idea, however, I do believe it falls under the tenants of cruel and unusual punishment. That being said, if a person could serve a 60 or 90-day sentence in 5 days, that would be beneficial to society from a cost perspective if the same level of rehabilitation takes place. On that note, I must ask - if time moves more slowly to the person on this fictional drug, does that mean that learning over time could be ramped up? Could we distort someones internal clock and then feed their brain information that all gets stored? This could be one way to upload someone with all the knowledge they need to complete an education..
Lets assume, the drug prolongs a 2 year sentence to 40 years.
Now you have two options:
- slow thinking. You get the gift of not really being able to comprehend whats going on anymore, its kind of relaxing (reports of several uses of medications. People are thinking slower and they like it and do not want to change it)
- thinking at the same speed as usual, while the reality passes much faster. You will not sense the reality as normal. If you experience any pain, it will last much shorter, if you are able to sense it as you're used to.
The other question, about american sentences in general: Why are the people (and the state) thinking about punishment as revenge (even to the extent of death penalty!), instead of just imprisoning someone, to protect the rest of the population?
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.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Disgusting new form of torture invented. WAKE UP HUMANITY - We need to focus on the good not another way to hurt each other.
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
how about we starve and beat Magdelena Luczak, 27, and Mariusz Krezolek instead? monsters don't deserve to live.
Why would you want to develop a drug to make living peoples life worse. When it could be used to make dying peoples lives better.
Judge her by her own words, not edited snippets of them. It's the job of an ethicist to appreciate ethical dilemmas before they become practical reality. I'm not completely convinced, however that she hasn't crossed the line into advocacy of some truly disturbing proposals.
did you know that london tube officials are considering a scheme whereby passersby will be able to help stop runaway trains by pushing others onto the tracks, thereby saving the lives of countless others. It's true. I read it in the daily mail.
Like something out of the movie Inception...
If you're going to use a movie reference, there's a much better one out there. The movie Dredd revolved around a new drug called 'Slo-Mo', which caused a time dilation effect in users identical to the effect described in the article.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
This sounds like the ultimate study drug: pack more thinking into each real minute? Sign me up. It's a shame their first idea for it is a negative one.
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
The purpose of the justice system isn't to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible. How would administering this drug nor be a form of torture? Perhaps Dr. Roache should spend a little time reading what the constitution has to say about cruel and unusual punishment before she continues her evil experiments...
Prison / death penalty isn't just about deterrent, it's also a functional culling of people deemed through due process (ideally) to be ill-suited for our present society.
I think it's far too easy for people to get wrapped up in the idea that prison is supposed to be vengeance, like you said. If you were the victim, directly or indirectly, you really aren't going to be made whole again by intentionally causing someone else to suffer, as much as you may want that. What you really want is empathy / recognition that you've been hurt by your assailant -- and for some assailants that is just NOT POSSIBLE (ie. if they are mentally ill, sociopathic / psychopathic).
That said -- one reason I could see this drug be useful is that people could be given 30-year sentences in 30 days (or whatever), so that the deterrent effect could still be in place, but while simultaneously reducing overcrowding because people's sentences could be processed more quickly. If we're going to do things like this, I would hope that rehabilitation would become more of a factor -- ie. if someone is going to be chemically slowed to experience 10 years over 6 months or something, can they then get 6 months or so of rehabilitation after they've served their sentence? You're still reducing the prison-occupation time by 90%, and they get to keep 9 extra years of their lives to turn things around, so how about trying to do things to keep them from coming back?
Why not combine time dilation drugs with torture!? Heck let's bring back the Brazen Bull.
Seriously this is a messed up proposal.
It's called "Windows 8"
Table-ized A.I.
I'm pretty much about punishment, the death penalty, etc, but this even seems a little silly to me.
If someone isn't intimidated by a 20+ year prison sentence, they won't be intimidated by a 1000-year virtual one.
If someone has committed a crime that heinous, I personally believe that we should just kill them. No, I don't believe in rehabilitation for violent offenders...it's totally not about that. I think rehab is a silly, futile concept that statistics prove doesn't really work anyway.
Life isn't precious, it is ubiquitous.
-Styopa
I've seen that film.
Eggiweggs. I would like... to smash them. And pick 'em all up, and THROW-
If that's not unusual and cruel then what is? Wasn't the revolution partly fuelled by people getting locked up in stocks, pressed etc which led to the laws about "cruel and unusual" punishments?
Forget about punitive uses... how many times have you wished for more hours in the day, so you can get more things done?
"Wow, that's a really complicated problem. If only I had a few days to think about it... [pops a pill] Call me in an hour."
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Just think... finally a drug that can make the minuteman seem like a 101 Arabian nights man!
Make that 1.4 minutes of pleasure from your man seem like 1.5 years of wanton sex! ;)
Seriously though... drugs are not the answer people, education and empowerment is the answer. Our society does not focus on education... the combination of information and the education required to process it is at an all time low in the world. Add to that a govt that seems to have completely locked 'empowerment' out of their policy chain.
What's needed is an environment that fosters empowerment and education. The creation of self worth through empowerment is a very powerful tool. I can see why the current govt wouldn't be interested in people who think and act for themselves. .5% a day over at Scrypt.cc?ref=baagt Check out #scrypt.cc on freenode if you have questions. Site is about to leave Beta! ;) Loving it!
BTW... Do you have BTC sitting around in a wallet somewhere? I'm earning an average of
Could we allow prisoners the option of serving a 1 year sentence in 4 months by using time-dilation drugs? Or a 25yr sentence in 8 years?
You know, I thought you were talking about the white guy who slaughtered those innocent people in a Knoxville Church during the children's holiday play, because he'd been conditioned by right-wing media to believe that Democrats, liberals, African Americans and homosexuals deserve murder. But then I googled your terms and realized it's a different tune you're whistling. Let me see if I can harmonize with you!
Maybe we could strap representatives of the problem population to a cross, and set it on fire. Of course we'd have to wear some kind of outfits to protect ourselves from the fire... maybe something white with a hood would do the job...
Am I thinking what you're thinking, pinky? Ah, I thought so. Sig Heil!
I could think and accomplish 10x more in my 100 years. Seems like a huge opportunity for productivity enhancement, yet alone opportunities to get ahead in WOW.
This was part of a chaprter of Bleach: Mayuri Kurotsuchi vs Szayelaporro_Granz
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...when you could just make them watch 'Titanic' a few dozen times.
...one is forced to listen to Justin Bieber for the duration.
why not simply reinstate torture?
That's basically what she seems to want.
In the real world, there are many people who are only interested in punishing criminals, not rehabilitating them. They may pay lip service to rehabilitation, or try to claim that enough suffering can instill into someone a guilty conscience, but what actually motivates them is the emotional impulse to "hit back."
Realize also that western culture has inherited its mindset from a religious tradition in which the exemplar of perfect justice is everlasting torture without hope of forgiveness. Inasmuch as this is the example that our cultural heritage invites us to follow, it is no surprise that those interested in punishment for punishment's sake feel completely justified.
The Sentence (4 Aug. 1996)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt06...
DNRTFA
You should be ashamed of yourself. Why make people suffer? This is revenge, plain and simple. Just execute them or let them die and move on.
This is the 21st century. It's time we move beyond the dated view of revenge and justice. "Punishing" people may satisfy some primitive portion of a vindictive person's brain, but it isn't productive. It's time we face the reality that the prison system serves a single purpose: Keeping criminals out of general society so they don't ruin it for everybody else. As a second step, rehabilitation is the only meaningful goal one should aim for. Helping fix people so they can again or for once be a productive member of society. So again, enough with all this caveman talk about inflicting 'punishment'. It's old, it's tired, it belongs in the past.
I hate criminals. I hate crime. I believe in capital punishment.
That said, I think this weird drug-induced time torture is just fucked up. If she wants bad guys to get punished longer, why not help get the laws changed to extend the maximum sentence to +30 years.
I can't believe she's morally bankrupt enough to go public with this heinous sounding "good idea". It's a very hard thing to advocate.
IF the point of punishment is torture, then just fricking do the torture. These spineless people dont have the balls to tie the guy down and pull out fingernails with pliers, but want to make them suffer a 1000 year experience inside a box?
These articles show me how uncivilized the human race really is. Just a bunch of sick animals.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In my youth I committed a felony (robbery, in NY) and was subsequently sentenced to seven years in prison. After serving my time and being released (been out six years now) I have no desire to commit any crime of any sort, I have two college degrees and I am a productive member of society. This is not due to the fact that prison was horrible are in any way like torture because it was not. It was actually very boring. The reason I have no desire to commit crimes stems from the fact that you will eventually get caught and have to serve time in prison. I spent seven years of my life very bored, essentially wasted years and I cannot get them back. they are gone for good. A punishment that may FEEL like 1000 years is NOT 1000 years. All said and done I would have only lost 8 hours. I still would have plenty of life to live barring some accidental or health dilemma. If someone commits a crime (especially where someone is injured or dies because of it) they should lose a tangible portion of their life in return for it cannot be replaced, I do see rehabilitation in this, not in 8 hours no matter how long it feels. For when that eight hours is over and I come back to normal time I will know only eight hours has passed and I still have my whole life ahead of me while quite possibly the victim is scarred for life or has no life left to live. Why should someone get to keep the best years of their life when they have taken someone elses?
Would be a great recreational drug. There are times in my life where I would total love to feel like it lasted long. (That's what she said)
I could also use a Fast-Forward drug for those parts of the day that just keeps dragging.
Dr. Roache sounds like the sociopath in this instance. This is torture.
this is Nazi science...England & associated Academic Institutions (Oxford, Cambridge, etc) love this stuff.
they want to do this, "tinker with their brains" because of their own curiosities & fascinations...not for science or to help make a more just society
Thank you Dave Raggett
I want the drug to let me cram a Masters degree into a single month. I'm guessing it's so poorly designed that you have zero motor control or any ability to use any of your senses and you end up only seeing blurs and hearing static the entire time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I vote for sending whoever came up with the idea to a psych ward.
It's like they enjoy making people suffer, make them wish they could die and torture them until they break.
This is sick.
all this talk of this being "torture" and stuff makes me scratch my head... all i can think is I need this drug to handle my everyday life!! Imagine being able to make the time between now and that looming deadline as long as you like? hell, if i had committed a serious crime and I felt the authorities closing in on me, I would take as much of this drug as i could to extend the time I had left before they threw me in the slammer!
What if I was studying for a test or certification on this stuff? Would that 8 hours be comparable to 1000 years of study? Would my brain forever hold that knowledge having been tricked into believing that I have been looking at it for 1000 years?
If there is one thing humans haven't dedicated enough effort to, it is accurately re-creating hell right here on earth. What a laudable goal. /s
you cut it out. Then why do we coddle these predators? Why invent something new when a 9x19mm FMJ to the back of the head is simple, cheap, and quick enough? And I give a defecation about any possible pain they feel in the same they felt about the pain and suffering they inflicted upon their victims.
What is needed is an anti time dilation drug to make certain events more tolerable.
20XX: Eric, Larry, Sergey, Ray, et al. succeed in uploading minds into QC chips...
20XY: First felony conviction for aggravated societal menace for seeing a gun shape in a passing cloud (also first use of fMRI thoughtcrime evidence in a criminal court), defendant sentenced to 1000 years as an ore freighter in the asteroid belt.
20YY: Sir Eric knighted.
(with apologies to Phillip C. Jennings)
Time stood still and I was in hell...
it was my first marriage.
This is vindictive and pointless. If life in jail is not enough, too bad.
The same advocates for this would object to a 10 year sentence being served in 1 year, so be careful what you wish for.
Looking to the other coments, and thinking it better, it's a terrible idea... but it's so interesting that very easily impresses people. In fact in third world countries with full dirty prisions, it may be a great idea to reduce public deficit (so they were be more able to spend money in schools and hospitals). But, one of most insightful thing I red was "prision is not only punishment". Fact. There are many aspects involved. One of them is the idea of departing people who are dangerous to other people and comunity.
Could you use these drugs for sex to make it feel like you were going at it for days? Maybe it could feel like you were orgasming for an hour!
"might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free?"
So.....
Take criminals dangerous enough to deserve this kind of punishment, mess with their brains and distance them from a reality they once knew by 1000 years and then set them free into society.
I'm sure she has thought deeply about the science but has Dr. Rebecca Roache really, really thought about this?
This isn't about greater justice. It's about greater revenge. Not the same thing.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The premise of this article is so sad. The Justice System's sole objective should be to prevent crime, not to exact vengeance for crimes, and all policies should be judged in this light. We should be asking, "What effect will this policy have on crime rates?", and not "What does this person deserve?". Obviously, some kind of punishment as a deterrent is a necessary component; we just need to keep in mind the purpose.
A corollary of this way of thinking is that the justice system (and society in general) should be very interested in helping convicts re-integrate when they get out of prison. There's a lot stacked against a person coming out of prison, and unfortunately I think people tend to assume that most just deserve to have the rest of their lives ruined and don't deserve any help in re-establishing themselves. Finding jobs, housing, general acceptance is good for preventing recidivism; not to mention that these are fellow humans, and if they want to be productive members of society we should be helping to tear-down the roadblocks in their way instead of putting them up.
Here's an alternative way to look at time dilation drugs as a punishment increase:
Someone can serve a one year sentence but it will seem to them like 10 years. Possibly the deterrence value of that sentence went up, while the actual time goesdown, meaning a) less of a lifetime lost for the criminal and b) less money spent by the tax-payer.
the public deficit thing, in case it didn't get clear: over here we have many prisions, with even much more people inside than they should, and there's no choice, we must make more (at least to properly alocate the prisioners). So, our alredy limited public budget will be even more compromised and there will be few money to spend in education and other more important stuff. In THAT particular aspect it will be very positive. BUT there are many other moral and practical reasons that make this shit worse than the clockwork orange.
I always knew the British were a bloodthirsty, vindictive lot.
And this just reaffirms it.
Why are we so focused on making life as miserable as possible?
Why not use these drugs to shorten actual sentences while still serving justice. If someone is supposed to serve 50 years in jail, why not have them serve 2 years under the effects of this drug (or whatever is required to achieve the proper effect.) Then we can start a rehabilitation process, lower jail populations, and hopefully get this person back into society.
But no ... we, as a society, are too consumed by PUNISH. PUNISH THE BAD PERSON, despite a warped vision of what evils have actually transpired.
This signature is false.
This was actually an episode on Star Trek DS9. O'Brien was punished by some alien culture and served a ~20 year sentence in a matter of ~hours (iirc). They claimed it was more humane and economical than prison. However I think the moral of the episode is that it really scarred him mentally (and he was innocent, again iirc).
Could there be a humane way to use something like this? Personally I highly doubt it, but I can't completely rule it out as just barely plausible (Kinda like Star Trek in general). I just can't imagine how this would be used without causing mental instability.
PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
Can't we use this kind of thing for good? Make my vacation last longer?
It costs tax payer thousands or 10s of thousands a year and we're releasing prisoners early because we want our cake and eat it too by locking criminals up for a long time but we don't want to pay for it. Just give someone the drug and lock them up for a week. They're feel like they served 10 years, or whatever, and never do crime again. Why? Because prison is not a deterrent, it's retribution. Yeah I know this is stupid. Just as stupid and the whole idea. I was just making a point.
Why would we do this?
What does anyone gain by making the convict experience 1,000 years of mental torture? It doesn't improve the victim's life. It doesn't stop others from committing crimes. It doesn't do anything productive or helpful. It is just torture for the sake of revenge. It is stupid and sadistic.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I suggest the woman who had this idea be subjected to her own punishment. Her idea is criminal and she ought to be hoisted by her own petard.
01/01/01
But if you are so "dumbed down", do you really experience to hear static, and does it annoy you? Or are you just in a state where you do not really sense anything.
Let's put ethics aside for a moment.
Imagine that for a year, every night you have a dream. This dream seem to take 1 day but every morning, you forget almost all of it, like it is usually the case. Now, they give you a drug that make these dreams feel like 1 week. Would the year with the drug feel longer than the year without the drug ? No, because the dreams are forgotten anyways.
Another example : If you went to an amusement park, you may have waited in line for maybe 1 hour for a 1 minute ride. A minute waiting probably feels much longer than a minute riding. Yet, at the end of the day, the wait time almost vanished and it seems like you spent your time doing rides.
This is not time dilatation like in Einstein's relativity where a second have a strict definition. Humans have plenty of different "clocks" for different things and different scales, all using different references. Using hallucinogens to mess up with some of these clocks won't necessarily make the others follow.
If you are still unconvinced you can make a parallel with size instead of time. A drug that make you feel like object are much larger than they really are don't mean that they also seem more distant. Even if it would seem like a reasonable conclusion, our brain doesn't work like that.
With all the people running through here, i'm surprised no one has mentioned Bleach. :D
There was an episode in Bleach where one of the main 'bad guys' had developed a drug that functioned almost exactly the same way, but when applied in larges provided the effect of extreme time dilation.
Now, imagine that scenario, and what would happen if you were exposed to ANY stimulus.. especially pain. To continue in my example, the bad guy was finished by being overdosed with his own drug and then slowly impaled by a sword, through his hand, into his heart.
Sure, it's fiction, but here fiction and reality coincide. IF this drug could be completed, take said prisoner and start sticking needled in their hands, pluck hairs... whatever. Mundane irritation instantly becomes super effective torture. Because that is the only way to describe it at that point... torture. There is a good chance the sensation of pain for that long would cause heart failure or other maladies.
Still though, my curiosity wants to see if we can accomplish this... imagine wifey-fun-time on this drug
We could use these time dilation drugs to allow convicted criminals serve their sentences in a matter of days rather than years.
20 year sentence? You can do your time before lunch! 40+ years? You'll have to spend the night.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
This place has gone to hell.
If the drug is intended to make prison more of a living hell I'm surprised there hasn't been much recreational use of it to make the walk-on-the-beach type episodes more of a living heaven.
Even if this could be ethic, what I seriously doubt, what about the side effects of being drug for so long time?
If this is the kind of justice we are pursuing, why not just killing the criminals? Cheaper.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
From a scientific viewpoint, there is no such thing as punishment (negative reinforcement is a WHOLE OTHER THING {WOT}). "Punishment" is the word certain primates use to describe the suffering they inflict on others. Just sayin'.
Negative reinforcement stops the instant the behavior being negatively reinforced stops. That's why it works. All this stuff was worked out by Skinner many years ago, yet we still have the worlds largest (per capita AND total size) gulag AND the day prisons for children (you might call them "schools". My 10-year-old friend says that's an acronym for Six Cruel Hours Of Our Lives.)
I would totally take this in small doses to make every weekend seem like a year. I would shoot up, drop some e and party my ass off
Maybe we just give it to researchers and have them think about a problem for 100 years but it's only 10 minutes. Think of the tech advances!
thank you for clarifying this.
That one, while pretty graphic, was actually pretty good. I don't know how well it meshes with the comics, but standing on its own it was pretty enjoyable. I'd like to see some sequels.
What about doing the reverse, for life sentences?
Sometimes someone innocent is given a life sentence, and that fact comes out later. They can be freed, but the amount of damage done to them is still high. Could the reverse of the proposed idea be used to lessen that damage?
(The idea would be to use it on everyone. If they're guilty and never released, so what? But might it be a way to minimize damage when mistakes are made?)
... imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence ...
Just make them watch C-SPAN all the time.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Can your brain actually process information in this time dialated state? Could I for instance have an entire Dr. Who marathon after work played at super high speed and still be able to know I've seen all the episodes? If so, sign me up.
Could this be given to terminally ill patients so that they get the gift of a life time of wonders without all the blisters of from trekking, early mornings, hangovers, late nights, working life, lousy bosses, mosquito bites, etc..
Just imagine being able to gift a full-life world holiday to someone: Machu Picchu, Tierra del Fuego, a life of diving the greatest reefs, gliding the Andes, kayaking the Colorado.
Sorry, but as much as I may want some of those criminals to suffer, there is a clause in the U.S. Constitution that says people can't be subjected to Cruel or Unusual punishment, and this clearly would be unusual, and arguably cruel.
We may not like it, be we are still obligated to obey it.
A murderer should suffer as much or more than the victim. Televise it. They are now deterred and they won't do it again. A mad dog is put down lest he bite again.
Marvelous idea; now we can waterboard enemies of the state for far longer.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. (1984)
Nearly sounds like the plot of Dredd, sort of.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt13...
The drug of choice was called Slo-mo and altered ones perception of time. In one scene it made someone falling from a height that would have taken maybe 20 seconds seem like hours.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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Why does no one mention using this drug to lenghten joyful events? Time dilate your wedding day. Let a terminal patient enjoy his last days.
If a drug like that exists and is safe, can't we all benefit and start living 1000 year+ normal lives?
Criminals can be denied this drug, this would be harrowing to be limited to a short few years, boring ones to boot.
She should try it herself, then she can consider if she still thinks others should be subjected to it by force. I had a bad experience with drugs, and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
The primary reason I don't believe in capital punishment, is that the legal system is far from infallible, and it is much easier to reintegrate into society after many years of incarceration than it is to reattach a head.
However yes, it is much the same, only you are saying, we would execute you, but we occasionally make mistakes, so just in case we will keep you around in the off chance we did. Some might say that life imprisonment is more expensive, however I believe the US system has shown that this isn't really the case.
There has been more than a couple of cases where a prisoner doing life has been exonerated. Also this would usually immediately involve a civil case, that would likely award the person a lot of money, which might not give back the years, but might make integration back into society a bit easier.
but in that episode there where in a VR for there sentences for years in the VR but on the out side it was only a few hours.
It feels like 6 months but you only have to feed them for 6 days.
Is this a punishment so heinous that it's introduction is the only crime heinous enough to justify it?
Did anybody else catch this little line near the bottom?
"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?"
"Tinkering" with the brain? Really? Citizen, please report to Attitude Adjustment Center for Rehabilitation. I'm more terrified of someone deciding to fundamentally alter the biological basis for who I am as a person, than I am of being locked up for the rest of my life. Sure, it's a great deterrent by fear, but that's not the kind of society I want to live in, myself.
Did anyone else hear the 1000 years and think it would be awesome to make a 1 week vacation feel like a month or two? Would be addicting as hell. Screw prisoners, I want it for the beach!
if we could do the opposite this would be a great idea. if convicts could serve their year, 10 years, whatever in a month or two it would save imperial and metric assloads of money, and it would be more humane as the deterrent would still be there without the devastating social and economic side effects.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
This is the plot of a ST:DS9 episode where O'Brian is incarcerated for years (I think 20) but only a few days of actual time occurred. It's one of DS9's darker episodes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Time_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine)
This was also the plot of an Outer Limits episode.
So much research but you still failed.
Pentobarbital WAS used in execution before the 3 drug replacement. Yes. It is replacement.
Guess what?! Phenobarbital and pentobarbital aren't the same drug! Furthermore, pentothal and sodium thiopental are synonymous, and *that* drug is not pentobarbital, either. Words mean things.
Since you made such a basic error while simultaneously being a dick, feel free to go ahead and cite your sources to indicate that the US protocol originally used any other anesthetic drug than thiopental. I'll wait, but I won't hold my breath.
PENTObarbital also would not be considered ethical to use for animal euthanasia either because it, like thiopental, is also a very short acting barbiturate. PHENObarbital is a long acting barbiturare. Obviously, during a goddamn execution you don't want the fucking drugs wearing off while the non-medically trained executioner techs are bumbling around with your other poorly chosen set of protocol drugs.
I am mostly irked because the choice of drugs in the classical three drug cocktail is so obviously retarded. It offends me in the same way that seeing an automobile design with square wheels would offend me, especially if everyone else in the world started copying the design because "these other people are doing it and so it must be a good choice!". It's just not fit for purpose.
The British public are too stupid to see that this is torture, and instead will be classifying it as a good thing.
Like that Internet censor.
'cause THE CHILDREN, AMIRITE?
All very good to get your rocks off on child crims, but the cunts will use this sort of drug on other classes of 'crims' and the crims will use them as well
Save up a weeks worth of meds and take them all at once = bullet time. That's when I'd make an escape attempt.
So using this logic, we could do the same thing to prisoners sentenced to 2 years and let them out after a month or two, right?
I could use this on my next vacation
Roche are the only criminals here. There's no such thing as a time-dilating drug, it's just a good excuse to get some tax money into their pockets. So sad.
You do realise you are just giving people who have bothered to read a bit and look around at the world something to laugh at?
Jails the world over have lots of cells with an "innocent* man**" in them. Many are referred to as political prisoners, but in some cases they just got in the way of someone who is corrupt.
After time passes the corrupt can lose their influence, but whoever they have executed is still dead.
Also the deterrent aspect did not work in England back before the American Revolution and it shows no sign of working in the US today.
My values are simple: some things are evil. Inflicting pain and suffering is evil. Self defense is not, including killing someone in self defense. Locking up someone who has done evil can be under the umbrella of self defense, in the sense that society as a whole is protecting itself, from the idea that someone who has done an evil act is more likely to do it again.
But, there are a lot of people, who if you peel back the rhetoric, are basically saying: I want to kill other people, to inflict pain and suffering, and this is one of my excuses to make it legal.
Not as evil as people who prey on the innocent. But the evil is in the nature of the act: torture, killing not in self defense. The evil is not in the nature of the person you are inflicting it on.
With extended families living under the same roof, less awful crimes would be committed. No way every grandparent and parent and uncle and aunt are going to stand by a room away while a kid is beat to death.
Time dilation drug, sonic pain inducement.
That's right, make it seem like it's a century, but with pain levels that make you feel like you're being dropped into boilling oil, skinned alive, shredded with razors all while being elecrtrocuted repeatedly and having acid poured over you and salt rubbed into your open wounds.
While nothing really is done to you, you just feel like it is.
Have it turned on and off, pulse it so you feel the pain, then nothing, then pain, then nothing, using a pseudo random number generator so you cannot know when to expect the pain to hit or go away.
Hook em up to catheters to drain the waste, and iv drips to feed them, electro-muscle-therapy to keep their muscles in shape, all while being pelted with nauseating pain off on and on, 24 x 7, for a minimum of 5 years, which will seem like 500.
Perfect - and that's just for the politicians who don't make the country better for the people, instead of the corporations.
Now, for someone really vile, like someone from one of the alphabet organizations, make it 50 years hooked up.
If it's a rapist, 75 years, first offense.
If you injure a child, make it til you die. (That includes smoking in an area with minors present)
For presidents who violate the constitution - well, there's already penalties for that, we the people just need to apply them.
Impeachment for starters, then trial for treason, then the treason penalty during war-time footing. This should apply for the last 5 presidents including current.
what a bunch of sickos... what a terrible and perverted use of such a substance... shameful.
While I agree that Dr. Rebecca Roache is a sociopath and a horrid human being, can her drug be used to shorten prison sentences?
Say, a thief is condemned to 1 year in prison. If he accepts to use the drug, can he serve only a few weeks?
So this article is about a non-existent drug that could be used to torture people. So a desperate dude wants attention and comes up with a flamebait cruel and completely made up "drug". This kind of desperate articles are up every day on Internet.
Why is this even on Slashdot? And this is the most discussed one?
Is this the dark ages and we use imaginary techniques to turn lead into gold?
I'm utterly grossed out of what Slashdot has become. Whats next? News about rappers having decided to wear longer chains and celebrity clothing?
I thought they were different things...
i want it, 1000 year holiday might help. think, you have 1000 year thinking time, solve problem, invent something, it would be hell of a ride.
Someone's missed the point.
Can I take a small, short-acting dose of this in the form of a nasal spray, and finish reading the entire encyclopedia while I wait for my coffee pot to finish brewing? If implanted in reservoir form, in something like an insulin pump, (along, probably, with a quick-acting antidote) could I actually gain the benefit of "bullet time" when trying to avoid a car wreck when some texting-while-driving type cuts across three lanes of traffic? I believe this was touched upon in the Honor Harrington series, and it seemed like a good ideaand now somebody's gone and figured out that it's actually feasible.
And we go and waste it on this?
*sigh*
Goddammit people.
Can I get a trial prescription of this so I can get more work done?
Theoretically, this could save the state a HUGE amount of money, by shortening sentences, and solve the California prison over crowding problem.
I'm not of the opinion prison really helps, anyway. Some threat of punishment can discourage crime, however, many people learn from the criminals in prison, how to be a more skillful criminal. Like crime college!
Taking this time dilation to slowing time into expanding the capability and opportunity of thought could lead to approaching the singularity more quickly. This will allow us to process and enhance our tech stacks.
makes me feel better?
If my girlfriend uses this drug during sex...
Seriously, the first people that need to be put on these types of drugs, once they are developed, are the people working on developing them, and everyone that supports this type of work
They each deserve 1,000 year sentences.
There are other potential uses here. What about using it to prolong things that feel good or require making use of every conscious minute? Real time dilation would be best if you could actually increase the rate of cognitive perception and maintain some kind of similar synchronization with technology. You could use something in less time than it's actually length, like watching a movie at twice the rate of play while still perceiving it in real time. Ideas like that can be used for savouring time besides the purpose listed here. Brian Joseph Johns
Focus here seems to be on punishment. Reality is long sentences and death penalty are just as much about making other idiots think twice before they repeat the crime. By manipulating one persons brain to think 30 years is 1000 years does not change the fact he/she will get out in 30 years. What would really be interesting is if you could manipulate the perp's brain to relive the crime as the victim, every day, for their entire sentence (with days off for good behavior of course)...lol...sounds like a George Carlin skit....(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ2snsLxWw)
One must ask the question, is sadistic punishment making society just as much a culprit as the criminal. Rather than punishment, I suggest just incarceration in a functional self supporting institution where the perps work, support their own life but are NOT allowed out into society. Time dilution idea
S are all about punishment. It is the idea of a person who I think likely belongs in my hypothetical prison themselves. Conjuring up punishments is the wet dreams of mad people and sadists...criminal in and of themselves. Taking miscreants out of society for good works for me. I volunteer Baffin Island north of me for just such a place...give them the internet, good seal steaks and a solid job but never let them return to society of they committed heinous crimes...like inventing time dilution drugs and punishments using them!
Clearly the opinions are divided. However, I like the idea from the standpoint of reducing the taxes requires to house criminals by dilating time to serve a sentence. For example in the episode "Hard Time" from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Miles O'Brien serves a 20 year sentence for a crime by placing the incarceration period in his head. Only a few hours had elapsed. No housing, food, or medical expenses required! In that case he was falsely accused of a crime he did not commit so therein lies the need for a safety check. Are we imprisoning the guilty? And why do we imprison people? Well for one thing to remove the dangerous ones from society. That is valid. We really need to stop punitive punishment though such as putting grandma in jail for pot possession. The penal system NEEDS an overhaul. We need better and swifter justice for the accused and the victims using more logic and common sense and stop cowtowing to "political correctness" and the ACLU!! As far as heinous crimes like rape and violent murder, do we really believe we can "rehabilitate" that person? If not, should we pay to incarcerate them to keep them away from civilization or expedite their removal from this planet? I doubt they sit in jail thinking how they "regret" what they did. I'm not for needless execution, but in some cases it is the right thing to do.
Like Inception? More like from The Outer Limits episode "The Sentence", as in this is not a new idea and there are old sci-fi stories about exactly this. By all means, however, please keep thinking everything about the mind is "like Inception".
people just are not rational enough to avoid crime
That may be true, but it's also true that those who have been executed will not commit any additional crimes.
Imprisonment can't make the same guarantee. Some of the imprisoned commit crimes while they are imprisoned.
Harsh punishments like sentences longer than a lifetime, life, even the death penalty all lack in one area. The guilty person never experiences how their victims felt, not just physical but the terror they may have gone thru. Until they feel the horror they haven't really been fully punished. And only apply the death penalty once? Why not just revive the person (drowning as a way to execute would make this easier), and then kill them again. Lather, rinse, repeat until the just stop coming back.
This sentiment is exactly whats wrong with our society. Justice is not the same as retribution and jail is not about punishment. If it were and you were interested in punishing someone who beat their child to death, then the only sensible sentence would be to be slowly beaten to death over the course of several months. But retribution is meaningless, and jail is about rehabilitation. If prolonged time to consider their actions was useful in recovery, then I'd say go for it. But to use it to create a cruel and unusual punishment is just torture, pure and simple.
1 - this would seem to fall under cruel and unusual punishment (they have laws against that, right?)
2 - if they want to extend someone's life as long as possible to inflict the maximum amount of suffering, why should taxpayers be compelled to pay to feed these criminals three meals a day AND pay for the drugs that are being proposed on top of that? Spending more money on criminals is not the answer.
3 - How about in cases of especially heinous crimes where there is no doubt of guilt, we just throw the criminals into a pit 300-style and let them slowly starve to death?
I always thought those movies were dumb that punished criminals by freezing them for x years then thawing them out. That's not a punishment. People would pay for that.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I see them using the word "punishment", but really they mean "revenge". They aren't the same thing, though they are often confused and can overlap.
Why women shouldn't be able to vote or hold office. The don't think rationally, they FEEL.
Could this drug be used to help somebody learn a lifetime of knowledge in a few short weeks? The potential for education is staggering!
This is about revenge, not rehabilitation
The Wired article linked to for the "time dilation drug" is psilocybin (shrooms). I'm sure some prisoners would be quite happy to test this policy out, as others buy this drug for recreational purposes....
It was a season 4 episode of Deep Space 9. O'Brien is arrested on an alien world for "espionage" for asking too many innocent questions (I guess that society frowned on curiosity). He is thrown in prison, and serves what he thinks is a 20 year prison sentence where he is barely fed, and he and his cellmate have to hoard food so they don't starve during the times they "forget" to feed them. O'Brien eventually kills his cellmate over a few pieces of bread. Then surprise! He wakes up in a chair with a bunch of blinky lights on it, and Dax and Sisko are there, and it turns out only a couple hours of real time had actually passed, and the experience was just implanted into his mind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... Good episode, but I'm not sure I'd want to see that happen in real life. It caused him a lot of psychological problems.
It's better to punish someone with time dilation drugs and let them free after a month, rather than keep her locked up for all her life in prison. I support time dilation punishment as a humane alternative to long-term prison sentences.
Didn't I see this drug on the criminally underrated Dredd?
(ObUK: 30 years isn't the maximum sentence available here, we have life sentences with a range of minimum tariffs ranging up to "no release". (The "no release" sentences were recently challenged but found legitimate as the Home Secretary has the ability to review them in exceptional circumstances.)
But this idea is dumb. The purposes of punishment are: (a) public safety, (b) rehabilitation of the offender and (c) deterrence. The modern consensus is that that is the correct order of priority, too. So let's look at these:
(a) Using a drug to administer a 1000 year virtual sentence would do nothing for public safety because the real sentence time would be the same - it would only go more slowly in the prisoner's head.
(b) This would do nothing to rehabilitate the offender. Prisons are pretty terrible places in terms of any reasonable measure of success at rehabilitiation, and it doesn't seem plausible that "longer" in prison would help, especially if the prisoners were "time dilated" and therefore presumably would find it very difficult to interact with other, non-time dilated, people.
(c) The deterrent value of this is questionable. We're talking about people who are already going to be in prison for pretty much all of the rest of their lives. If that isn't enough of a deterrent to someone it seems unlikely anything could deter them.
Plus it would appear to fail the "cruel and unusual punishment" test.
The only possible benefit could be to allow people to complete their 10 year sentence in 1 year, but while that would make jails more efficient to run it would be a big fail on the public safety and deterrence arguments.
as if they were not enough puritans and think of the children fanatics..... fucking police state shit. now a normal good person would think ' great we have substances to extend time perception, now our rides at the theme park will be awesome... or sex.. or any other pleasurable activity'... but no.... some fuck head retard medievalist fuck want to apply this to punishment. Of course... 3 fucking thousands yrs of western philosophy and history didn't teach anything. fuck you people.