Hypothetical re: crime and punishment

[ashurbanipal]

What about the use of it for those who are in for life? Or to make literal the serving of multiple life sentences?

That's a good question. I'm afraid I don't know the answer, but I can make a suggestion or two.

If we go back a few centuries, the idea of long term incarceration was almost non-existent. People typically "paid" for their crimes with their lives or enduring some kind of torture or having some body part removed (e.g. in many jurisdictions thieves would have their hands or fingers cut off). With the Enlightenment of the latter half of the 18th century, the idea that long-term incarceration should be the solution to crime gained traction, mainly because it was thought to not deprive the criminal of their reason in the way that torture or maiming would do.

As the concept developed, there was an idea that long term incarceration involved a kind of recompense--someone who steals property from another is literally stealing that person's time, in that the victim had traded hours, days, or weeks of their own life to purchase the item that was later stolen from them. Therefore, the thief would be punished by depriving him of time, and hopefully in the process he would reflect on the fact that he had taken some amount of time from his victims, and now that he knows how that feels, he won't do it again.

The loss has to be real, though, if incarceration is to meet that particular criterion. I tend to think that the worse kind of criminal probably cannot be rehabilitated like that, so what point is incarceration to serve? My suspicion is that the main point is just to keep them separated from law abiding citizens. There's no rehabilitating them, and punishment for punishment's sake only makes them worse, and so for that reason, it's hard to see how VR would be of any benefit in this kind of case. However, those who believe in punishment for the sake of punishment might well find the idea worthwhile if the experience could be made miserable enough.

One aspect of this that does occur to me is that someone put into a permanent VR world would take up a lot less room than someone in a real life prison cell, so if space is a consideration, this might be a point in the idea's favor.

I agree with your point here, although we could do much the same with our RL prisons. Maybe not as customized as the VR could be made, but we could still do better with how we set up the prisons.

I agree we could do a lot better, but I had in mind some very robust customization that would make rehabilitation more likely to succeed. Psychologists could study the process and learn to design programs tailored to a specific inmate that would stand a better chance of being successful.

However, I do want to return to the original question. Do you think that the time served in the VR satisfies the punishment of time in prison, given that the real world time will be much shorter, but they still experience the full time personally?

Depends on the texture of the time served. If it's not a good time for the inmate, then it could work, but I do think that the loss of real-world years serves as a considerable deterrent to most people.