Double post, sorry.

With the advances of the Human Cognome Project in behavioral modification and memory manipulation I don't think punishment for criminal acts is necessary any more and I doubt that many judicial powers bother with punitive sentences any longer unless those justices are tied to the whimsy of a moralistic population. Probably; 'paying one's debt to society' involves getting an attitude adjustment and working to pay off the damage you've caused. I think that getting "locked up" only happens where you've got people for whom vengeance is a social more, or when the psycho-surgeons diagnose the criminal as untreatable.

It really depends on who catches you. It seems reasonable that, for non-Jovians, they may 'kill' you, remove your cortical stack, and transport you as an ego for trial. Trial depends heavily on where you are, and is probably the most interesting bit of the whole process. How does an Anarchist society conduct trials? This is a non-trivial question. Once captured and tried, punishments range. No one is going to waste time and space supporting a biomorph in prison (well, the Jovians might). So we have a span of options. From most humane to least: Simulspace 'behavioral modification' simulation. It's a world where good behavior is rewarded! and bad behavior is punished :( instantly and unerringly. A great example of this is one of the Red Dwarf books, where Lister is imprisoned for having will killing a judge at his own trial. Behavioral modification. Think Clockwork Orange. When you try to hit grandmothers, you either find you can't do it, or you're overcome with wracking pain. Indentured servitude. This would be sold as most humane, but really probably isn't. Go work it off for a corp. And since you're a con, expect a longer sentence and more abuse. Cold storage. We don't have time to deal with you, so you're put away for future generations. True death - you and all of your backups and forks are sought out and destroyed.

Sepherim wrote:

Nefarious crimes: this includes acts like participating in the complete desturction of a habitat, major permanent killing or individuals, major conspiracies, allying with TITANs, causing the Fall, etc. Such crimes would probably be sentenced to permanent death, though some habitats may be more "creative" though equally severe. All reps would drop to 0 (would go to negative if possible).

Just to note: negative rep is possible in a sense. Take a look at the "black mark" negative trait. It probably covers the situations you are talking about.

The classic criminal punishment is the fine. Many crimes are punished by a fine that might either be pre-set, determined by the court or be proportional to income. It doesn't have to be money either: it can be community service or restitution to the injured part. One interesting aspect of this is that it might lead to repossession of one's morph. It is often a person's most sizeable asset. In some jurisdictions old rules and preventing bodily punishments may prevent this, but in most this is a straightforward situation. After all, living as an infomorph has never killed anybody. Social ostracism is quite powerful, especially since it can be technologically augmented. AR markers of shame, communal filters blurring nonpersons or "sexual offender: do not approach" messages when getting close to potential partners/victims. Exile is somewhat problematic, since the receiving polity need to accept the exiled, but among autonomists this is sometimes used to get rid of undesirables - some egos are passed like hot potatos from habitat to habitat. Imprisonment can be done in several ways. Software prison simply puts the ego in a suitable simspace. Depending on polity and their views on what imprisonment is for (rehabilitation, retribution, deterrence, protecting society etc.) this might be running in realtime, speeded up or even slowed down. In fact, some jurisdictions can punish people by putting them into cold storage for a set time. Prison simspaces might also be shared or single-user (but possibly with AI companions and jailors attending). Psychosurgery is tricky from a legal standpoint. Modifying people means their capacity is (at least) temporarily reduced, and this messes up the often strong deontological views about what punishment and justice is for (but consider the current US use of medication to make mentally ill convicts sane enough to be executed). If it serves rehabilitation liberal (and even some non-liberal) jurisdictions might be OK with it. Utilitarian societies might find modifying criminals to be better citizens OK. I would envision many smaller habitats during the Fall becoming fairly ruthless. Survival was paramount, and they could not afford any dissent. In most cases this was entirely accepted by everyone - lives were at stake. But afterwards many of the strict laws remained on the book. A lot of the punishments involve maintaining the community resources and limiting access to them for offender - lowered food rations, being stripped of equipment, given punishment work or having their morph seized (more than one fall refugee found themselves sleeved in the former body of a recalcitrant ex-citizen, shown his stack being thrown out of the airlock and told that they could be next if they are not more helpful). Hypercorp justice is actually rather liberal. Hyperliberalism is built on updated versions of classical liberalism, where individual autonomy and liberty is regarded as paramount and institutions built to safeguard them. While the de facto implementations might be sadly deficient (the local corporate policies on a Fa Jing production station legally bind people ruthlessly, and the local enforcement and arbitrators all work for the corp) the PC doesn't allow arbitrary laws and institutes certain democratic controls. The downside is that the PC thinks indenture is OK, so while you cannot be *forced* to do indentured work, you can end up so indebted to someone that you have to work for them. Anarchocapitalist systems like the Extropians have a relatively well-developed legal system (in a sense, *everything* is contracts, including contracts with law enforcement, court companies etc). I think there is a strong bias towards monetary restitution here: most parts involved are more interested in making a profit and maintaining good reputations than whatever ethical or political abstractions people like to dress it up as. The truly scary question is how autonomist justice works. While autonomism is all about not forcing others, this of course breaks down when crimes are committed. While the theory says that the goal is to heal the breach between the offender, the injured and community through restorative and rehabilitative acts, there are rarely any codified rules - caseworkers tend to decide what to do, adviced by community forums. Unfortunately community policing can often be as ruthless and bigoted as any mob, and it is weakly constrained. Do something that outrages your local commune and you will be punished fiercely - but you are supposed to smile and agree that this restores harmony. If you don't, then you are dangerously unmutual and need some more constructive self-criticism or psychosurgical healing. In fact, many autonomists think that the only reason people commit crimes is mental deficiency or "bad programming" since there should not be any root causes in their society - so psychosurgery is completely rational to do.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

It really depends on who catches you. It seems reasonable that, for non-Jovians, they may 'kill' you, remove your cortical stack, and transport you as an ego for trial. Trial depends heavily on where you are, and is probably the most interesting bit of the whole process. How does an Anarchist society conduct trials? This is a non-trivial question. Once captured and tried, punishments range. No one is going to waste time and space supporting a biomorph in prison (well, the Jovians might). So we have a span of options. From most humane to least: Simulspace 'behavioral modification' simulation. It's a world where good behavior is rewarded! and bad behavior is punished :( instantly and unerringly. A great example of this is one of the Red Dwarf books, where Lister is imprisoned for having will killing a judge at his own trial. Behavioral modification. Think Clockwork Orange. When you try to hit grandmothers, you either find you can't do it, or you're overcome with wracking pain. Indentured servitude. This would be sold as most humane, but really probably isn't. Go work it off for a corp. And since you're a con, expect a longer sentence and more abuse. Cold storage. We don't have time to deal with you, so you're put away for future generations. True death - you and all of your backups and forks are sought out and destroyed.

In reality, I highly doubt that true death would ever be an option. Even with the most heinous criminals, a backup of their mind would likely be kept... whether for research purposes or whatever. Not only does this have educational merits, but it can also act as an insurance policy... if by some crazy off-chance someone is proven to be innocent years after their execution, they can be restored from backup.

In fact, one thing I've always wondered is how to judge someone. Why make a trial when you can access that person's memories from a given moment and just check if he committed or not the crime, and all that applies? I guess that if someone does a heinous crime and is found guilty of it, if he remembers he has done it (and those memories haven't been edited), you can't comit a mistake, and thus some places may condemn him to permanent death without a need to store him at all.

You certainly got a point there. Touché. :)

root@Crime and Punishment [hr] Another great punishment I thought of for a criminal organization would be to sleeve a transgressor into a Fur Coat. If you haven't seen the equipment write up, a Fur Coat avoids getting red paint splashed on it because it isn't dead! It is just a nearly mindless living creature in the shape of a coat, which is still humane because it is literally as dumb as a rock. Sticking an ego inside of it, and perhaps attaching a display interface to it so people can see the ego suffering inside, is decidedly not humane.

"Do you like it? I had it fashioned special, just for this occasion. You see, I thought you might be considering betraying me on this, so I wanted you to know what that would entail. Do you remember Eddie?" Fur Coat twitches pathetically

Root, dude, you are my new hero!! I love both ideas! The second punishment, I could see it done by Gray Xu, the way I (re)imagined her.

Root, you certainly deserve g-rep +1 after such ideas. :)

Regarding those pesky double posts, in EP verse - such things could be even worse for forked persons. I enjoyed the fur-coat punishment too. I can see another reason for it. [i]"Doesnt this suit you? After all, you wanted to be in "my" clothes. Generous as we are, we decided to fulfil your ambition... literally."[/i]

Quincey Forder wrote:

Well, if the convict tried to commit genocide, or willingly infect habitats -plural- with Exsurgent virii or create new TITANs on murderous intents, I think that would justify Real Death. For the kind of crime that threatens the existence of the whole species. If the will of the culprit itself is an X-Risk. The interest of many before the interest of a few, as the vulcan saying goes

Even today, files generally never disappear forever. They may get archived away, never to have eyes peer on them again... but they exist somewhere in the deep recesses of some filing cabinet or hard drive. In that same vein, it's very likely that even the most heinous criminals will have their minds stored away on some hard drive, somewhere, if not for the purpose of restoration, at least to make sure that we have the knowledge filed away should it ever be needed again. But no matter the case, the most diligent person can find a file with enough searching and scouring, and the right resources. Today, it's a saucy photo someone took in their college years, or a trophy from some random party crime... in the future, it could be a lost ego backup or TITAN blueprints. It never seems that anything gets truly lost forever, though.

root@Crime and Punishment [hr] I think most polities treat cold-storage as not having any rights, but if you run an ego, you don't have the right to turn it back off. I imagine that most "prison" would just be cold storage, or a reduction in rights so that the jailers can turn troublesome egos off at will. Which brings up an interesting point: if there are piles of infugees that are in cold storage, wouldn't the most effective punishment be to cycle that ego into cold storage and start up a random infugee by lottery? This could be seen as a way to "pay your debt" to the society: your actions just freed up a processor thread for someone else to use.

root@Crime and Punishment [hr] These wouldn't need to be x-threat people, just vulnerable. If someone in the clanking masses causes property damage to my oligarchmobile, and they can't cover it, and they don't have any useful skills, in some polities they've just lost their right to exist. Or at least, they get to go to the "time out box". For a thousand years.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

Indentured servitude. This would be sold as most humane, but really probably isn't. Go work it off for a corp. And since you're a con, expect a longer sentence and more abuse.

Imagine three consecutive centuries working as a CEO's spam filter. Or being forced to personally monitor a keyspace seiving application on a physically isolated cryptology research server. Or being an oligarch's personal porn librarian for sixty years. Or maybe working as a security researcher's tool, personally fuzzing every possible inupt method of an application in accelerated time.

If Employee of Corp A causes harm to Corp B, there are a few ways to settle it (all this is assuming we're in PC-controlled space). First is the question of personal liability. Right now, if an employee of a corporation causes harm while doing his official duties, the civil liability falls to the parent corporation, not to the employee. The PC is an offshoot of economic unions, so it seems reasonable to assume that economic laws still apply, which may include that one. If that's the case, the employee would suffer no consquences in court, but may suffer professional consequences for being a butterfingers, such as loss of bonuses, paycheck cuts, demotion, or termination (being fired, not killed). Second question is, who knows about it? If Corp B knows, they'll press the issue, and Corp A will do everything possible to come away smelling like roses - which may include throwing the Employee under the bus. They'll paint the employee as being personally responsible, acting on his own and not as part of the corporation, etc. HOWEVER, neither corp is likely to want to pursue remediation in the courts, so it'll all be settled quietly, likely with Corp A paying an amount to Corp B to cover the damages, then using their evidence of employee misconduct as grounds for driving the employee into the ground. If Corp B doesn't know, Corp A will work to cover up for their employee, because they don't want any liability for it. So there would be absolutely no punishment. Or alternatively, they'll make it open, to avoid future liability for conspiracy. They just want deniability. If theyr'e covering it up, obviously they can't punish the guy directly, although they might cause him some minor pain some other 'unrelated' way. Regardless, I don't think PC law will really come up. Corporations don't like to get caught up in the courts. What's nomic?

I am sorry to dig up an old thread. I have been thinking about punishment in this setting. I have read a book called the broken land which is somewhat trans human. They used forced modification of a persons body as a punishment. Basically bio engineered him into an ox to work fields. I could see this in eclipse phase. You commit a crime and lose your morph for a time, either giving it up to the person you hurt or giving it up to the habitat for ego casting. Even on a temp basis. This could be pretty cool for a plot hook, where someone is mistaken for a criminal after ego casting into their old morph. Almost a total recall type story. you could also have the ego forcibly loaded into morph to work. Something that is very limited to a simple task or something with very limited free direction. Perhaps being loaded at an infomorph that controls some very simple functions of a habitat. Maybe a component of a bio-ship colony organization. Before learning about eclipse phase I was working on a sci-fantasy game based of A.I. by digest publishing group, what little info i have. The sci is all biological. One of my ideas was forcing someones Brain into a giant slug that is used for transport. This would give an element of body horror as the "person" becomes aware of their new body. Doing something like that in eclipse phase you could have the person struggling with controls and not understanding what is going on. It may even have an element of psychological torture as the egos will is subverted by the people piloting the ship that is the ego's morph. Any Thoughts?