The year is 2119 and you’ve just been sentenced to 10 years for stealing someone’s personal
air vehicle, aka, flying car.
Now let’s try and imagine what kind of punishment the authorities might meter out.
Maybe you’ll be sent to a penal colony, except this colony is on Mars and there you’ll
be doing hard labor since there’s a lot of work to be done up there.
Or perhaps you’ll be cryogenically frozen, and kept that way for 10 years.
Think about it, this is one way to remove a menace to society and when they are awakened
it’s unlikely they’ll want to go to sleep again.
They won’t have aged, so you could say it’s a humane way to punish someone.
As you know if you watch any of our medieval torture videos, the way we punish people has
evolved over time.
Back in the day you could say humans were quite brutal, and for even small infractions
a person might be beaten, whipped, branded, or even blinded.
For the bigger crimes someone might have been burned at the stake, crucified, broken on
the rack, pulverized on the wheel, or had their limbs pulled off.
We put an end to that kind of thing for the most part but then sentenced people to hard
labor, the kind of labor someone was lucky to survive.
At the moment, most countries use incarceration, we simply deny a person his or her freedom.
Some justice systems are more progressive than others, i.e. some countries focus more
on rehabilitation than mere segregation from society, but we have been stuck with putting
people behind bars for quite some time.
History tells us that how we punish will evolve again, and the prisons of the future will
be very different from how they are today.
There is a lot of information out there regarding what we call prison reform.
You can find certain groups applauding prisons in Norway, where inmates in one prison we
saw are housed in cells that look more like apartments.
Prisoners are treated well, eat well, can be educated and have fulfilling jobs while
on the inside.
Some of them even have access to Facebook or YouTube, so they could be watching this
show.
Norway also has a very low recidivism rate, meaning prisoners tend not to commit a crime
again once they are released.
They are, in many cases, rehabilitated.
You can also find critics of the current system saying many prisoners are actually mentally
ill and need to be treated rather than locked in a box, while a lot of progressive voices
tell us non-violent drug users shouldn’t be locked up because they bought their day’s
supply on the street and got frisked on the way home.
We will go out on a limb and say many countries around the world will soon begin to take a
more progressive approach to why and how we lock people up.
Come 2119 our views on this will have progressed a lot more, and we really can’t say how.
We do imagine, though, that prison will be less about punishment and more about rehabilitation.
That said, there will always be nasty people in the world that we don’t want on our streets.
There will always be scammers who delight in taking people’s life savings; there will
always be people with sadistic impulses that do things to others that make our stomachs
churn.
We can also say there will likely be people that defy rehabilitation and keep reoffending.
Perhaps these people will be punished in a way that right now we see as futuristic.
As we said, perhaps one kind of punishment to take people off the streets but not really
harm them is to freeze them in time.
It’s painless for the prisoner and it serves society to have them gone for a while.
Is it humane?
Well, you can tell us what you think about that later.
First of all, when we talk about freezing the body these days we mean after we die and
we call this “Cryonics.”
The website Cryonics.org tells us people who’ve been “cryopreserved” might be revived
or reanimated in the future when technologies have improved.
Those technologies might be related to the fields of 3-D printing, stem cell research,
nanotechnology and molecular biology.
Lots of people have opted to be cryopreserved around the world, with about 250 people already
in the deep-freeze and another 1,500 signed up for it.
No mammal to this date has ever been reanimated fully after being totally frozen.
Cryonics.org tells us, “Although, a whole mammal has not yet been cryopreserved to cryogenic
temperatures and revived, science is moving in that direction.”
How much does it cost?
One of the main places to get this done is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in the
USA and the total cost could be around $80,000 - $200,000 depending on various factors.
The Cryonics Institute will do a full-body freeze for as cheap as $28,000, although for
that it seems you don’t get regular attention.
You are merely stored.
It seems if you get this done in Russia the cost can be as low as $12,000.
To do this, though, you have to be legally dead.
Cryonics advocates hope that this will change, because they believe someone who is terminally
ill could be frozen and then brought back to life when medical technology can easily
cure them.
With prisoners of course, they could be frozen when in good health.
Right now this is the stuff of science fiction.
There is no real foundation at this time to say it can be done, but we don’t know how
technology will improve.
It wouldn’t be absolutely wild to imagine a future when this is possible.
It’s speculation right now, though, not based on actual science, and that’s why
right now some people who believe in it are sometimes called “kooks.”
For one thing, the detractors say, the body after being frozen will be just too damaged
to ever be revived.
It’s a matter of fact that when ice builds up in human cells it can destroy those cells.
Maybe with the help of nanotechnology cells can be brought back to room temperature safely,
but right now that’s a long shot.
That said, if you could go back in time, say 200 years ago, and ask a scientist what he
or she thinks about some present day technologies they might say “not a chance”, “don’t
be silly.”
We just don’t know what’s ahead of us.
If humans have avoided global catastrophe come 2119 and have in fact progressed as a
species, maybe they will watch this clip and say, “Oh boy, you really had no idea what
was coming.”
What about Mars as a penal colony, a bit like Australia was in the past?
Well, it’s unlikely right now as just to put a person in space costs millions of dollars.
That may all change come 2119, though, but even if great breakthroughs in space travel
do happen will we send prisoners to the new home?
You might have heard tech wizard Elon Musk say that a place to live on Mars, called “Mars
Base Alpha”, could be built by 2028.
But he’s not talking about a place anyone can live, replete with dollar stores and fast-food
restaurants, he’s talking about a place a highly trained astronaut could visit for
an astronomical- pun fully intended- amount of money.
Even if they did get there by 2028, there is no way we’d be sending prisoners up there
for a long, long time.
Even if we could send prisoners to Mars, it would be an ethical minefield.
If they’d be doing all the dangerous jobs and still be confined in some ways, as we
said already this kind of punishment is outdated and seen as cruel and inhumane.
With presents changes in mind, if we did send prisoners to Mars it would only be if they
lived in good conditions and were trained to do useful jobs in which their safety was
paramount.
Still, because of how extremely difficult it would be not just to get to Mars, land
on it, build on it, and live safely on it, we don’t even think 2119 is far away enough
to be putting prisoners up there.
We just cannot see that happening.
We do see prison populations being reduced in the near future and countries figuring
our better ways to rehabilitate rather than just lock people up for them to come out no
better or even worse.
In the distant future, though, maybe we will freeze people in time when the powers that
be see no way in changing their ways.
How do you think prisons in the future will look?
Will we value rehabilitation over punishment?
Tell us in the comments.
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