Instant Prison

Cruel and unusual punishment?

Yeah, but if the technology to program and experience years of memory without losing actual life existed, the demand would be so high that the tech would be perceived as wasted on fake jail.

  If the tech is expensive, than education, training, therapy, and especially warfare would be prioritized.  If the tech is cheap, then entertainment would absorb demand so entirely that it would be hard to get anybody to do much of anything.  If people wanted to do crime, they could do it in memory without actual harm.

If we have the tech to give you prison fix the criminal mind instead.

I'm not sure it would be "wasted" on fake jail. 

All of that aside, my main point here is that, if it was easy to give convicted criminals a very authentic 20 year long prison experience instantaneously, would we want to make it "more humane" (splice out all the stabbings) than it currently is, or "more horrific" (splice in extra stabbings) than it currently is?  Would you mix multiple experiences to increase the length of stay (so you wouldn't have to wait 20 years to implement your new system)?  Would you record one year from 20 different people of different races (one for first year and one for second year and one for third year up to year twenty) and then splice them all together?

I'm sure the psychological impact would be pretty serious, but would it be better or worse than an actual 20 year prison sentence?

I said perceived as wasted. Any tech that can download years of experience will be perceived as essentially life extension: users get to experience more life than non-users.  Whatever the actual cost savings, the electorate seems pretty likely to begrudge prisoners that extra life.  The electorate would be more likely to expect prisoners to lose actual experience, lose some portion of their actual life and therefore require actual jail time.  Extra life would likely be seen as a premium reserved for the lawful.

I do like those movies.  "Until the End of the World" is one of my favorites- where people can record their dreams and play them back but the effect is incredibly addictive. "Brainstorm" is another good one.

I'm thinking you could make the experience both safer and more cruel by making the prisoner relive the same super-dull day over and over again a la Groundhog Day.  I doubt any democratic govt. would allow traumatic programming- stabbing, rape, etc but I can understand how trauma without physical harm might appeal to sadists.  We might also consider  the possibility of forcing convicts to experience the victims perspective relevant to their crime.

If you had a choice between Hell and nothingness, what would you choose?  Knowing it is the wrong choice, I would probably choose even eternal torture to the total cessation of experience?  I'm thinking yours is essentially the same question except on a smaller scale

How about giving them 20 years of memories of living in a stable 2 parent family surrounded by people that love them and push them to better themselves.

If we have the tech to give you prison fix the criminal mind instead.

Do you have any theories about how to do that?

How about giving them 20 years of memories of living in a stable 2 parent family surrounded by people that love them and push them to better themselves.

Wouldn't that just be a REWARD for crime?

So, can't we just poison them in order to remove some of their "life"?

Good ol, Wim Wenders.  I'll check that out.  Wasn't "Brainstorm", oh wait, I was thinking of "Mindwarp"...  Christopher Walken?  I'll be looking for that as well.  Don't forget about - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpZiNO2CRtw

I did think about the same day over and over, but without some sort of progression, I'm pretty sure you're begging for insanity.  Unchanging stimulus is basically sensory deprivation and that's only "safe" for about 72 hours. 

Forcing convicts to experience something similar to their victims is interesting but may run into the same problems you mentioned with stabbings and stuff.  I mean, if you purposefully caused a convict to experience the sensations of murder of maiming, doesn't that make you a psychopath?

  I mean, what if their "crime" is hacking into someone's VR rig and forcing them to experience a flurry of stabbings?  Is that not a "real" crime?

Somewhat surprisingly, people will often voluntarily subject themselves to pain when they are lacking stimulus (bored).  I saw one experiment where they left someone alone and told them not to move from their seat in a plain looking room.  Within two minutes they shocked themselves on a small electronic device that they KNEW would shock them and which they told the researchers they absolutely refused to touch a second time.

Insufficiently severe.

I agree and I also think our present penal system often strives to achieve just such an effect.  In the deep routine of high security prisons, the days must seem particularly invariable.  It has been shown that solitary confinement has severe mental and psychological effects on prisoners.  

Charles Dickens, who visited the Philadelphia Penitentiary during his travels to America, described the "slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body"

They made a movie about that right? Clockwork Orange?

My mind instantly goes to recent studies of the relationship between rape and porn, finding that as the availability of porn increases, incidence of  rape decreases.  That makes sense to me.  Rememory technology could certainly be used as a kind of super-porn.  What I don't know is whether satisfying criminal fantasies generally decreases the criminal impulse.  

Although violent crime is down, I don't think the increase in first person shooter games can take much credit- in fact, mass shootings which more closely resemble first person shooter experience are up.  Would allowing an individual with a mass-shooter impulse to live out a Columbine program decrease that individual tendency towards an actual mass-shooting? I don't know....my gut says probably not: rape has an inherent denouement that mass-shooting lacks.

Certainly, virtual theft does nothing to increase one's actual fortune but then few enough thefts are the result of urgent need.

If Rememory were common enough, perhaps the withholding of virtual experience would be a sufficient deterrent.  Imagine we lived in a world where you worked one day IRL and then you went home to your Rememory bed to enjoy another year on your luxury space station with Scarlett Johansson.  Wouldn't you be less likely to endanger the life you value by committing crime on your one real day each year?

Insufficiently severe.

Please explain.

If you could give convicted criminals an experience of 20 years of "whatever you choose", you could make it as severe as you wish.

If you are only concerned with "missing 20 years of your friends and family", well, a lot of these convicts don't have a lot of "friends and family" to miss in the first place, and even if they did, would you approve of a sentence of 20 real actual years of them in physical isolation, where they had daily access to some sort of virtual reality that allowed them to "live" a "normal life" that would prepare them for their release?  I'm imagining some sort of TNG style "holodeck" where they would be instantly ejected if they performed any anti-social or criminal actions.  Kinda like - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlaNKKHzNKQ

In your OP you said "you get the memories of 20 years in a state penitentiary." Here you say "an experience of 20 years". That's not the same thing. They must actually experience the punishment, not merely have a memory of it. 

What do you have after 20 years of experience?

What do you have after 20 years of experience?

A memory of an experience of 20 years.

If you could give convicted criminals an experience of 20 years of "whatever you choose", you could make it as severe as you wish.

If you could give convicted criminals the memory of an experience of 20 years of "whatever you choose", you could make it as severe as you wish.

There was an Outer Limits episode - "The Sentence" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentence_(The_Outer_Limits)https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5cfyoc ) that dealt with something like this in a fashion that I'm more agreeable with. In the episode the mind actually experiences the sentence in a simulation - Something like the matrix. After the simulation is complete the prisoner returns to reality without much time lost from his actual life. Contrast that with the "Total Recall" idea of implanted a memory but where the prisoner's mind never actually goes through the experience.

Zoiks.  Ok, so I agree with your "The Outer Limits" version.

Would you have any recommendations about exactly how unpleasant such an experience should be?

Part of the punishment for crime is the opportunity cost - The lost years that a prisoner won't be able to spend doing something better. This is part of the price - Part of justice. If prison becomes instant, then that price would not be paid. Sentencing policy was made made under the assumption that there would be this price to pay. However, payment may be tendered in alternative currency. The experience would have to be different in some way to make up for the fact that the prisoner now retains those years... the scales of justice must not me made to tilt one way by implementing this policy. It wouldn't necessarily have to be more unpleasant, but perhaps the experience could be longer with standard unpleasantness. For example, a prisoner may have to spend 3 years in virtual prison to count as 1 year in actual prison. Something like that.

My main concern is over the question of, is it more important to "punish" the offender,

That sounds perfectly reasonable.

My main concern is over the question of, is it more important to "punish" the offender, or is it more important to train them to be a better member of society?