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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Also DS9, Season 4, "Hard Time"
She ripped off the idea from pretty much every sci fi show ever. Why not just have the prison orbit a black hole?
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.
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.
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.
1) Give it to my girlfriend
2) Make love for two whole minutes
3) Sleep happily
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
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.
It's not as if compassion or forgiveness are new concepts. You profit from a system which creates criminals, then you want those crimnals to be murdered. You are a willful murderer by proxy, and you'd like to see more of the people who suffer so that you can profit murderered. You, sir, are a waste of skin.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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...
You do realize these behaviors are so prevalent precisely because they were selected for in earlier versions of the Darwin games?
Every man has murder in him, many sexual assault convictions come down to a he said-she said credibility contest, and there do exist circumstantial thieves who would rather find a job. It would be a task of enormous difficulty to fairly implement a removal policy.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
How would you remove them from society?
Execution. Simple, fast, effective.
You do realize these behaviors are so prevalent precisely because they were selected for in earlier versions of the Darwin games?
Yet supposedly we're the smartest animal on the planet, able to suppress Evolution's pull and understand right from wrong. If someone can't grasp the simple concept that murdering someone just so you can have their phone is a bad thing, there really is no hope they'll be a functioning member of society.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
You don't know each person in prison's motivations; hell, you don't even know why they are in prison, or whether or not their incarceration is justified. Yet here you are, saying that those people have no right to live?
How does that make you any better than them? You don't have to pull the trigger to be an accessory to murder.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
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.
Civilized people do not support vengeance or torture.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com...
Destroying Slashdot One Article At A Time!
.. 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.
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?
But why not just call ourselves "God" and be done with it?
Torture. Is. Bad.
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.
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.
Why bother with the criminals, our weekends could last for days with this drug.
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"
Umm . . . Maybe I'm missing something here; how is living a lawful life, and expecting others to do the same, make one "profit from a system that creates criminals"?
Personally I think the waste of skin, and oxygen, is supporting the people who have demonstrated that they are no better than wild animals in re fitting into the society we're trying to keep civilized. At some point it's simply public hygiene like spraying for mosquitoes or germs.
In fact, it should be like the points system for driving: Someone who has hurt many people - even if no one of them was fatal, or even life-threatening - is more deserving of permanent removal like a disease than someone who has done one thing, even a heinous thing. In the New York City large-population-density area, every so often there are news items about someone involved in their third or fourth DWI collision that injured people; one time is a mistake, take the integral and at some point it adds up to "this person is no better than a virus". People have been arrested with multiple sets of credit cards robbed at gunpoint; DNA tests have demonstrated serial rapists. All wastes of space.
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
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
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
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?
Also Fridays, 4:50 PM, 3 day weekend.
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how is living a lawful life, and expecting others to do the same, make one "profit from a system that creates criminals"?
You win at willful ignorance. The same "criminal justice" system that punishes the poor man for stealing food is designed to rubberstamp the rich man's wholesale looting of our coffers.
Someone who has hurt many people - even if no one of them was fatal, or even life-threatening - is more deserving of permanent removal like a disease than someone who has done one thing, even a heinous thing.
So what you're saying is that the people running these big banks that are fucking people over and kicking them out of their homes should be drawn, quartered, burned, and then taken outside and really hurt, right? Because those people are doing more harm than virtually anyone actually in prison.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
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.
Thunderdome.
Two men enter one man leaves. continue on just like march madness....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
"Maybe I'm missing something here; how is living a lawful life,"
You dont. you are a criminal. If you are a US citizen you breat at least 3-5 laws every single day. Some as felonies.
There is no such thing as a honest and lawful citizen with how the legal system is designed here.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
Time stood still and I was in hell...
it was my first marriage.
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.
You do realise how slippery your logic is, right? You are espousing the murder of innocents (as many innocents will die through your twisted sense of justice), which many people would think gives "no hope [you'll] be a functioning member of society", and so you should be killed. Idiot.
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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. . . .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So what you're saying is that the people running these big banks that are fucking people over and kicking them out of their homes should be drawn, quartered, burned, and then taken outside and really hurt, right? Because those people are doing more harm than virtually anyone actually in prison.
Yes. I agree. The people who instructed their staffs to con people into taking out loans that they couldn't possibly pay back have damaged trust, not just in the financial system, but in society itself. They have hurt thousands. Add up the damage, and punish accordingly.
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?
I thought they were different things...
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
Could this drug be used to help somebody learn a lifetime of knowledge in a few short weeks? The potential for education is staggering!
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.
Didn't I see this drug on the criminally underrated Dredd?
The society in the show was a dystopian police state that just happened to look like a utopia.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.