Anyway the USA is known for handing down some pretty impressive prison sentences where the person is convicted to hundreds of years, and then there’s this guy:
Obviously with current technology a sentence is limited to the natural lifespan of the person convicted, but what if life could be extended indefinitely? Should someone sentenced to a 500 year prison sentence have to serve all of it? Would that be cruel and unusual punishment in itself?
An episode of the British comedy series Red Dwarf had a similar storyline where one character, a human resurrected as a sentient Hologram, is ordered to serve a 9000 year sentence due to his negligence causing the death of a starships crew. Needless to say he gets out of it, but what if he hadn’t? 9000 years is pretty much longer than written human history.
If we ever invent a life extension treatment, and it is clinically proven and not so expensive it would bankrupt an institution, then we should give it to prisoners. If the life extension treatment were perfect - as in, someone would live until they died of an accident or homicide, assuming annual checkups and there would be some implanted devices in their body to call EMS and keep them alive for a few minutes - then it would be giving prisoners the death penalty if they were denied this treatment.
It would be cruel and unusual punishment, however, for a prisoner with a 500 year sentence to have to serve it, if that sentence was made during an era when the decision makers did not know about the life extension technology.
I would think it reasonable for the courts to review the sentence and decide what do to.
The ultimate solution to all this is to prevent convicted criminals from committing future crimes in a more humane manner than locking them in a cage. The obvious thing to do would be a device implanted in their brain or spinal cord that could paralyze their muscles. They would be watched at all times by an artificial intelligence that would classify each of their actions and send a signal to paralyze them if they appear to be about to commit a crime.
This would allow criminals to be reintegrated into society, just blocked from committing any further crimes, and the problem is solved. You could even think of this medical device as a treatment for criminality. You could probably do better and install the device deeper in their brain, actually preventing the impulses that lead to criminal behavior in the first place, but this sounds like a vastly more difficult problem.
I think imprisonment should generally depend on whether the person is genuinely rehabilitated or not. If someone still poses a risk (a serial killer who will always kill, for instance, no matter what,) then they need to be locked up for as long they are alive. Even if it’s 700 years.
If they are indeed genuinely reformed, then I think even 20-year or 10-year sentences are often draconian and inhumane.
Keep in mind that if we ever invent life extension treatment that works for, say, 150 years, that’s probably the same thing as thousands or billions of years. The reason being that by the someone ages to 150, the treatments would have gotten better, and so on and so forth.
Maybe we should find a way to prevent them from killing again instead of locking them up. Or lock them up physically but allow them to send a robotic surrogate into the normal world that is blocked from being able to kill people.
Oh, I know “thousands to billions” is a huge range. “Thousands” comes from the fact that if the accident rate were the same as today, but humans didn’t age, they’d live to somewhere between 567 and 1600 years, depending on the calculation.
But if humans didn’t age, they’d most likely take fairly extreme measures to make society safer. Possibly as extreme as keeping their bodies inside a bunker somewhere, surrounded by equipment to keep them alive if something goes wrong in their body, and they’d send robots out into the world.
But then the next factor is warfare. Obviously that could get every human killed.
So there’s just no way to know what the limit exactly would be. It could potentially be until the point that the sun runs out of fuel, though.
Set maximum sentences, such as 99 years, depending upon the severity of the crime. The man in Thailand who was sentenced to 13,000 years probably will only serve 20 because the law limits the maximum time for each of his offenses to only 10 years.
I read a short story once. (Yeah, I really did that.)
TL;DR: Guy makes a deal with the devil, wherein he gains immortality including freedom from disease and pain. (Not obvious what the devil gets out of this deal.) Free from any fear of death, he becomes a reckless thrill-seeker, eventually spilling over into sadism against other people to experience, vicariously, the horror and pain of it. So he pushes someone (mother? wife?) down an elevator shaft, remarking to himself: “I wonder how that felt?”
He gets tried and convicted for that and gets sentenced to life in prison.
Yeah, if you are sentenced to life in prison you should serve life in prison. If there is a parole option, well, that’s a possible out. If not…well, that sucks. For you. I would do the humane thing, though, and basically reverse or stop life extension treatments for such a prisoner, so that they have a normal lifespan (normal defined as what we all have today without magic medical tech). It’s pretty far-fetched that even if we ever get radical life extension that it will be a one time shot and then you never age again, or that it won’t be reversible, so that seems reasonable for anyone who does something so heinous that they are sentenced to life in prison.
So the convicted murderer should get a reduction in his 500-year prison sentence when the technology is able to bring his murder victim(s) back to live their normal lifespan.
Maybe. Attitudes might change, though. And denying life extension for a prisoner is the same as giving them the death penalty, which was not what their sentence was for.
Attitudes might change, but would they ever converge on a stable set?
Maybe. There are 2 gaping holes in our very concept of criminal justice :
a. Is the purpose to permit further crime or to get revenge on the culprit?
b. If the purpose is to get revenge, and human actions are deterministic (a combination of genes, random chance, and physics), how is this justice? You don’t “get revenge” on an inanimate object for jamming your finger, do you? Well, if you did, you’d be stupid.
We may discover that in fact humans actions *are *deterministic, and prove it conclusively, at which point punishment that does not reduce further crime would be stupid.
I believe man’s cruelty is the reason God limited our lifespan to current levels. In pre-flood (using a biblical perspective) times mankind lived to 100’s of years, and man’s ‘thoughts were constantly evil all the time’. Just imagine if rulers would live that long, the stagnation in humanity, the non advancement as the reulers serve to preserve their power and legacy.
Criminals to me are just those who have been squeezed to the lower rungs of the social economic ladder then they should achieve and there is a longing for what was taken from them and look to take any chance to get back at ‘the man’. The fault is the society structure that people advance at the expense of others and in a karmic sense it trickles down and some (actually many) are oppressed, some turn to crime, and some are falsely imprisoned.
God sees this as abhorrent but allows some of this to exist, but limited our lifespans so as not to allow this to continue to the point expressed pre-flood.
Now if God blessed and inspired us with such life extension, God would also feel us ready for it, either directly where we would not be so cruel, or the horrible results would spur change to a better society. As such either with such tech we would not do such to extend punishment, or we would and learn from our mistake and those who suffer would be martyrs.
They almost certainly will change over time…it’s what they do. The direction of change, however, is unpredictable. Also, have you considered that we would all still be around if radical life extension were attainable, assuming it’s sometime in the next few decades? Attitudes might change less in that case.
:dubious: If revenge were the motive then they would simply be killed
Yes, I do.
A kitchen drawer that continually jammed my finger when closing – I destroyed it. Remodeled that entire cabinet, replacing the drawer with open folding shelves. And the drawer face that jammed my fingers – that got the death penalty in a summer cookout bonfire.
And it wasn’t stupid, but a good improvement to my kitchen.
Same applies to humans. People who do continuing damage to society need to be: