Immortality, Biotechnology, And The Woefully Unprepared Criminal Justice System

Immortality, Biotechnology, And The Woefully Unprepared Criminal Justice System

Here’s an interesting thought experiment for you: What happens to life imprisonment — for murder and other heinous crimes — if the human lifespan is increased? If we live until 150 or 250 or 350 (which is very possible, given the direction of recent efforts into life extension) how many more prisons will we have to build to hold all of those murderers and rapists who just won’t die? Even if we can build enough prisons to hold them, will it be economically viable to do so? What about parole? Right now, many life sentences are up for parole after 15 or 20 years — but if we live for 350 years, doesn’t a 15-year incarceration seem a little bit on the lenient side for a serious crime?

As a futurist, this is the kind of thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about — and the kind of thing that we, as a society, need to sit down and discuss, before it’s too late. Incarceration is just a tiny piece of the life extension discussion, too: What about pensions? And healthcare? And employment? And education? These four factors combined have essentially dictated the framework upon which all of modern society is based — and they’re all based on the idea that humans are born, become adults around the age of 18, retire around the age of 60, and then die fairly soon after that. In the US, average life expectancy has risen from 69.77 years in 1960 to 78.64 in 2011 — a fairly small gain on paper, but a difference of billions of dollars in healthcare and social security spending. Imagine if we all start living to 90, or 100, or 110… or 200. You begin to see how indefinite life extension could cause some problems. (Read: Google’s Project Calico wants to make your lifespan its business.)

Because there are so many factors that determine the longevity of a human life, hard figures for life expectancy from birth and life extension in your later years are hard to come by. Generally though, in developed countries, the average life expectancy has been creeping up by around one year for every five years that pass. So, if you’re born today, you can expect to live around 80 years; but if you’re born five years from now, you might live until you’re 81. In general, as we’ve started to gain more control over cancer, heart disease, and smoking, this figure has been trending upwards. One theory suggests that life extension will actually slow down, because there just aren’t that many gains to be had by conquering heart disease and cancer — we’d get a few more years on average, but then old age will probably get us. The other theory, of course, is that our average life expectancy is about to shoot forward, thanks to gene therapy, replacement organs, and other advanced transhumanist approaches. (Read: What is transhumanism?)

But let’s get back to the original point of this story: If we do start to live until we’re 100 or 150, where does that leave our justice and jail systems?

In the future, jail sentences might be spent with your mind trapped inside a computer for a thousand years.

It’s fairly obvious that we can’t significantly increase the duration of prison sentences — it’s just not economically (or societally) viable — and so we have to look at other possible solutions. This isn’t as easy as it sounds — humanity has spent a large portion of the last 10,000 years trying to work out how to fairly deal with criminals, and yet plain old prison still seems to be the correctional method of choice. Execution is one very obvious method of solving the problem of over-full prisons — but of course that’s a non-starter. Another option is downscaling the number of people that get sent to prison, through crime prevention and different, non-prison sentences (rehabilitation, house arrest, etc.)

And then, of course, there are the terrifying, futuristic, technological solutions. After all, if we leverage advanced technology to extend our lifespan, why shouldn’t we also use it to deal with criminals? That’s the theory put forward by Rebecca Roache, anyway, who leads a group of scholars at Oxford University that are looking at how futuristic technology will transform punishment. Roache says that there are already psychoactive drugs that can distort your sense of time — and that it probably wouldn’t be hard to develop a dedicated time dilation drug, which when given to prisoners would make them “feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence.”

A precog from The Minority Report, tasked with predicting crimes before they happen.

Another equally terrifying biotech solution, Roache writes on her blog, would be to upload the mind of a criminal to a computer — and then speed up the rate of the simulation by a factor of a million — then 1,000 years of imprisonment could be experienced in just eight and a half hours. Showing her slightly more humanitarian side, Roache also says that the last hour or two of the simulation (i.e. a few hundred years) could be spent on treatment and rehabilitation. Voilà: Eight and a half hours in a Matrix-style chair, and out comes a suitably chastised and rehabilitated criminal. How kind.

Personally, rather than devising ingenious ways of tormenting fellow humans, I think futurists and technologists should probably focus their efforts on making the world a better place, through crime prevention and education. Let’s start with pre-crime, a la The Minority Report, and go from there.