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Prisoners 'could serve 1,000 year sentence in eight hours'

Future biotechnology could be used to make prisoners feel as if they were serving a 1,000 year sentence, a team of scientists claim

By Rhiannon Williams

3:01PM GMT 14 Mar 2014

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Future biotechnology could be used to trick a prisoner's mind into thinking they have served a 1,000 year sentence, a group of scientists have claimed.

Philosopher Rebecca Roache is in charge of a team of scholars focused upon the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment. Dr Roache claims the prison sentence of serious criminals could be made worse by extending their lives.

Speaking to Aeon magazine, Dr Roache said drugs could be developed to distort prisoners' minds into thinking time was passing more slowly.

"There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people’s sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence," she said.

A second scenario would be to upload human minds to computers to speed up the rate at which the mind works, she wrote on her blog.
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