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That would indeed be interesting, particularly because it would be a good test of how seriously people take cryonics when they're not motivated to deny the possibility of its success (to explain why they don't want to sign up, or why it wouldn't have been any use in saving the life of a loved one, etc.) — we'd see how many of them seemed to be seriously worried about the death row convicts coming back someday.

I think you have just suggested an excellent persuasion tactic. I can't think of a better way to convince people they want something than by having them see it as a privilege that a deplored group don't deserve.

David_Gerard14y00

And the important thing is the presupposition that this is a matter worth discussion in the public arena.

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2 Should criminals be denied cryonics?

by venetian

23rd Dec 2010

1 min read

2

If someone is sentenced to life in prison or the death penalty, should they also be prohibited from signing up for cryonics? Specifically, I'm referring to people like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_death_row_inmates

I am not talking about providing it for them, just allowing them to sign up for it provided they can somehow get enough money together and allowing a response team into the prison to retrieve the body after the prisoner has died or been executed by lethal injection. I think they should be allowed access to cryonics, because we don't know enough yet about the brain to determine how much of their criminal behavior is due to mental illness/disorder and how much is due to free will. It may be possible to diagnose and cure people like Jeffrey Dahmer in the future before they commit any crimes, or to cure those already in prison such that they won't commit any more crimes.

As cryonics gets more and more popular, this will become an issue, especially when the first death row inmate wants to sign up for it.

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[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky14y320

No.

In fact it should be provided for them, as it should be for all human beings and, just in case, chimpanzees.

Any other questions?

[-]venetian14y50

I don't disagree with you (except the part about Chimpanzees), but I can see this becoming a big issue eventually, like when some prisoner demanded a sex-change operation and the media freaked out, I can see them freaking out the same way when a major serial killer tries to sign up for cryonics: "Killer wants to be frozen to kill again in the fututre!"

[-]wedrifid14y60

I don't disagree with you (except the part about Chimpanzees),

I say keep the chimps, at least enough to support a viable population. None of this 'just in case' business. I want to conserve the heritage.

[-][anonymous]14y30

Would it be sufficient to just store some DNA samples, then?

[-]lsparrish14y00

It would be rather awesome if a major serial killer were to sign up for cryonics.

[-]nazgulnarsil14y350

especially if sylvester stallone subsequently signed up, pledging to stop him in the future.

[-]ata14y50

I tried to convince my friend Ted Kaczynski to sign up, but he didn't seem interested for some reason.

[-]mwengler14y30

Some more questions:

Paid for by whom? And why?

And what about bonobos and whales?

[-]wedrifid14y00

And what about bonobos and whales?

I'd definitely prefer bonobos to chimps. Whales might be a bit less cost effective.

[-]lsparrish14y10

Whales might be a good candidate for chemical preservation due to the cost effectiveness issue.

[-][anonymous]14y00

A stubbed toe is not deserved, but can be done if fun, once the head's preserved.

In regards to section 4.5.2 of the obsolete: http://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/tmol-faq.html

[-]Costanza14y160

These days, the average death-row inmate typically spends years or decades between sentencing and execution, being guarded and maintained by unionized workers, and during that time some great numbers of appellate lawyers and judges and their legal secretaries and clerks and assistants engage in a very expensive ritual that generally has very little to do with the facts of the case at all. In some alternate reality, a convicted murderer could just say:

"The hell with it. No appeal at all. Give most of that money as restitution to the victim's survivors, beyond that which the state would pay anyway. But a relatively small proportion should go to Alcor. I choose to submit to death by experimental in vivo vitrification under ideal conditions. At a time of their choosing, Alcor will test their theories about revivification on me first, before any other human subject. If I die, then justice will have been done. If I am successfully revived, then it will be shown that death itself can be conquered. In return for this, I would call upon the governor to commute my sentence to whatever is fair -- fifty years imprisonment, for example. But then, I will go free!"

[-]David_Gerard14y130

If you don't mind going dark side, explicitly forbidding cryonics to death row prisoners would make it seem more like something non-prisoners should consider a right to buy.

Edit: I'm slightly perturbed by how many upvotes this awful idea is getting. That's not a request for downvotes, but a request for why you upvoted.

[-]Paul Crowley14y30

I didn't upvote, but I hope people are saying that it's an accurate and amusingly cynical observation about the perversity of human nature, rather than "great, let's do that!"

[-]wedrifid14y00

I'm slightly perturbed by how many upvotes this awful idea is getting.

For my part I said pretty much the same thing.

Observation about persuasion tactics is not the same as advocation! :)

[-]Raemon14y00

I didn't upvote it, but I might have just because it was funny.

[-]advancedatheist14y90

"A s cryonics gets more and more popular"? What evidence can you supply for that statement? Many long-time cryonicists have concluded that the movement, if you could call it that, has stagnated. Mike Darwin even calls cryonics a "failure" now.

[-]wedrifid14y90

and allowing a response team into the prison to retrieve the body after the prisoner has died or been executed by lethal injection.

Skip that step. No need to bother injecting excess toxins. Anaesthetise then go straight to the preservation.

I voted the post up because it is a good question, even if the answer is easy. Especially easy since in Australia we consider the practice of capital punishment itself barbaric. I did not see why merely asking the question warranted penalty.

[-]NancyLebovitz14y80

The judicial system is extremely unreliable-- this in itself suggests that denying cryonics as though you're sure that all the prisoners with life or death sentences are guilty isn't sound.

Furthermore, while I doubt that permanent murder will ever be legal, sometimes the laws under which people are sentenced change.

[-]lsparrish14y10

The judicial system is extremely unreliable-- this in itself suggests that denying cryonics as though you're sure that all the prisoners with life or death sentences are guilty isn't sound.

This is a good point. Perhaps the courts could specify a minimum timeframe to keep the person cryopreserved, which is longer if the evidence is weak. At the end if the criminal is still considered guilty they are thawed and buried. If they are exonerated, their preservation becomes indefinite until a resuscitation method is developed.

[-]NancyLebovitz14y60

You are sentenced to read The Agitator until you understand how biased the system is in favor of arbitrary convictions. There are coerced confessions (otherwise known as plea bargains), corrupt judges and prosecutors, and inept forensics labs.

The evidence doesn't have to look weak to be bad, and some of what makes for bad evidence (a line-up can imply that the guilty person is included) can be pretty subtle.

[-][anonymous]14y00

The evidence doesn't have to look weak to be bad, and some of what makes for bad evidence (a line-up can imply that the guilty person is included) can be pretty subtle.

Bad evidence and an incompetent judicial process is a different problem to be addressed separately from weak evidence. I didn't say this was a solution for irrational convictions, just relatively weak ones.

[-][anonymous]14y-10

Well, the system can be (shall we say) less than optimal without being very much biased in favor of "arbitrary" convictions. For starters there are no plea bargains that result in a death penalty. In Less Wrong terms, plea bargains may be analyzed by means of game theory, which does not show that they are equivalent to coerced confessions.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "corrupt judges." Stupid and/or biased, I would grant you, but that's true for much of humanity, isn't it? I would suggest that judges in criminal cases in the U.S. and common-law nations, in their official capacity, suffer from fewer biases than the average person. I understand that similar precautions mayexist in European nations governed by civil law, but I'm not familiar with the specifics.

On the other hand, I'm reminded of Chesterton's poem, on another subject:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist

Thank God, a British journalist;

But seeing what the man will do

Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Strictly speaking, in most American criminal trials, the judge does not have the power to convict -- a jury does. Granted, the jury is chosen by a procedure that may not be calculated to produce the very best decision-making body. But I would hesitate to say that they are systematically biased to give "arbitrary convictions."

With that said, I don't think reading Radley Balko should be regarded as a punishment.

[-]ata14y70

I'd rather get rid of the death penalty altogether; if we take near-infinite lifespans as the default case, it is clear that death is a grossly disproportionate punishment for anything less severe than, say, wiping out the human species, particularly if the offender is a juvenile (under 1,000 or so). But if it is to remain, I'd support allowing them to be cryonically preserved... in fact, I'd support allowing them to go into cryopreservation right away if they don't want to appeal their conviction. Same for prisoners who merely have life sentences, if they'd rather just go into cold storage right away instead of sitting around for decades waiting to die. (And I agree with providing cryonics to everybody by default, including to criminals.)

Of course, any politician advocating this today would be sorted into the same category as the Rhinoceros Party, the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, Mike Gravel, etc. Which is unfortunate, but if anyone wants to try it, you may as well go all out and start the Freeze Serial Killers' Heads So They Can Someday Be Resurrected As Cyborgs Party. (That's my favourite method of deflecting damaging accusations — happily accuse yourself of them before your opponents have a chance to.)

[-]Jayson_Virissimo14y60

I'd rather get rid of the death penalty altogether; if we take near-infinite lifespans as the default case, it is clear that death is a grossly disproportionate punishment for anything less severe than, say, wiping out the human species, particularly if the offender is a juvenile (under 1,000 or so).

Yes, but if we are taking "near-infinite lifespans as the default case" wouldn't murder be even more wrong than it is now and so deserving of an even harsher punishment? Future murder might take thousands of years off of a life-span, but modern murder less than a hundred.

[-]Nornagest14y30

I'm honestly not sure I trust myself on this one. Our moral intuitions tend to go pear-shaped when confronted with infinities or near-infinities, as Dust Specks/Torture amply demonstrates.

But I'll bite anyway. Our current judicial toolkit is a pretty crude hack, at its best not much better than the death penalty, but its goals are generally held to be some mixture of deterrence, retribution, and reformation. At least the latter two are well served by punishments that don't involve the death penalty, an effective death penalty like denying life extension, or near-infinite punishment terms.

From a reformative perspective I think we can expect any desired amount of reformation to be pretty quick; it would take far less than a transhuman lifespan to voluntarily reinvent oneself almost completely, and it'd be all the quicker if we allow involuntary methods. From a retributive perspective, I'd expect any punishment to be proportional to the mental harm caused to others by the crime, which once again is small in comparison to the criminal's potential lifespan.

I'm not sure what the effects on deterrence would be, but I doubt they'd change the overall picture.

[-]Eugine_Nier14y10

from a retributive perspective I expect any punishment to be proportional to the mental harm caused to others by the crime, which once again is small in comparison to the potential lifespans here.

Depends, if the crime is murder how do you count the harm caused by ending someone's near-infinite life?

I'm not sure what the effects on deterrence would be, though.

I haven't fully worked out my theory of deterrence, but the crude first approximation, as briefly discussed here, is that the disutility to the criminal of the punishment should be greater than the utility they received from committing the crime, adjusted for things like probability of getting caught.

[-]Nornagest14y10

Depends, if the crime is murder how do you count the harm caused by ending someone's near-infinite life?

The retributive aspect of punishment doesn't attempt to compensate directly for harm to the victim; it attempts to give the people affected by the crime fuzzies by doing bad things to the perpetrator. The victim or victims can't be accounted for in this dimension of the problem; they're dead and cannot receive fuzzies. Hence the qualification.

I haven't fully worked out my theory of deterrence, but the crude first approximation, as briefly discussed here, is that the disutility to the criminal of the punishment should be greater than the utility they received from committing the crime, adjusted for things like probability of getting caught.

That sounds reasonable, and I think it's consistent with my model.

[-]yrff_jebat14y00

I don't think that your typical prison inmate is a perfect Bayesian.

I rather think that that should be, ideally, adjusted so that overall utility is maximized (weighing the utility of prisoners equally as the utility of the rest), which will be vastly different both from reality and from your model assuming the above proposition.

[-]ioip_n14y40

Criminals sent to prison for life-sentences, with no chance of parole, should be afforded the same opportunity to take advantage of Cryonics as any "free person" should, with specific legal stipulations;

That the prisoner cover all costs of the cryonics; from having their recently deceased bodies temporarily 'frozen' (See: Emergency Preparedness for a Local Cryonics Group document by Ben Best), shipped from the prison facilities, and having neuropreservation (their heads) or full bodies vitrified and stored at the cryonics facility.
Upon being brought back to life sometime in the future, the prisoner will proceed to live out the rest of their lives in the future prison.
Prison statutory reforms will need to take place within a particular state/provincial jurisdiction to cover the cost to tax payers for keeping them in prison. In the likely or unlikely event this "cryonics prisoner rights" law is repealed sometime during the patient's cryonics freezing, upon being fully revived the prisoner will immediately be informed of said repealment. The prisoner will then be left with no other choice but to work off the rest of their days in prison making future products; linens and license plates (or equivalent) to help offset the cost of their stay.

In the future prison, overhead costs will be dramatically reduced with the introduction of machine-based guards and more automated processes; such as food distribution to prisoners (which were typically handled by humans in the 21st century). This will dramatically reduce the cost to hold the prisoner in their facilities.

Prisoners serving out life-sentences shouldn't have the 'freedom' to walk free in the future. A life sentence is a life sentence.

Prisoners on death-row should not have the ability to take advantage of any cryonics services at all. The judge and jury made a lawful decision sentence the prisoner to death. Cryonics could be seen as death avoidance.

Those prisoners serving lesser sentences for lesser crimes (i.e. armed robbery, fraud) should have the freedom to pay for cryonics services. Their freedom would be granted upon the possibility that their criminal behaviors could be cured with nanotechnology, RNAi, etc. By acquiescing, the future prisoner could then walk free in the future world. Otherwise, if the technology is not readily available, this prisoner will then continue to serve out the remainder of their sentence.

Nathan Wosnack

[-]JoshuaZ14y30

Prisoners on death-row should not have the ability to take advantage of any cryonics services at all. The judge and jury made a lawful decision sentence the prisoner to death. Cryonics could be seen as death avoidance.

This only makes sense if one thinks that there's an intrinsic good in obeying "lawful decisions" and that that good is large enough to outweigh an opportunity to prevent complete and utter information death of a sentient entity. That's a claim that requires a lot of justification.

(On a related note, if there was a specific religion that claimed that if their burial rites are performed over a dead person, the person will one day be resurrected, would you forbid those rites to people on death row? If not, how is it different?)

[-][anonymous]14y20

Well, would we offer a prisoner on death row a one-in-a-million lottery chance to be spared the electric chair?

I doubt it -- when we as a society decide a person does not deserve to live, we mean we want him to die with probability 1. Cryonics offers an unknown but non-zero probability of survival. I'm not sure how I feel about the death penalty, but someone who believes in the death penalty should not allow cryonics after execution.

[-][anonymous]14y10

This seems reasonable since we don't assign a different punishment to those who survive botched executions.

But on the other hand people there are some people who are ok with the death penalty because they can let "God sort it out". Believing in a immortal soul or reincarnation and then killing someone seems to me more like a forced eviction and a extreme restraining order than a annihilation.

What if there are more people like that than there are people who are against executions on primarily religious grounds (this is far from clear btw since the Roman Catholic Church, arguably the largest religious denomination on the planet, formally lobbies and preaches against it)?

Why not argue that we should allow low probability far future acquittal in the form of death followed by cryogenic preservation on the grounds that there is a reasonable doubt that we as a society are wrong about this, and will be wrong for quite some time (longer than his natural life) but not forever. If we are killing them anyway, why not let our descendants to undo our mistakes?

[-]DanArmak14y40

how much of their criminal behavior is due to mental illness/disorder and how much is due to free will

The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Also, depending on what definition for "free will" you plug in, you can get pretty much any result you want in moral and philosophical issues.

[-][anonymous]14y30

because we don't know enough yet about the brain to determine how much of their criminal behavior is due to mental illness/disorder and how much is due to free will.

That depends on how you classify mental illness but I'm pretty certain free will never enters the picture.

[-][anonymous]14y20

No. And they also shouldn't be executed in the first place. Ever.

[-]Kenb14y10

Perhaps cryonics suspension should be a new form of punishment. It sure would save taxpaying public millions of Dollars. Imagine a jury considering a verdict between two alternatives: a death penalty, or a life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Sentencing to cryo instead would be equally severe and it would save taxpayers a lot of tax money. In a single case of a life sentence it would be a saving of several million Dollars. The problem would be that bleeding heart liberals would consider it a cruel punishment and conservatives would consider it a slap on the wrist :-)

[-]shokwave14y00

It seems like cryonics would count as pr(it works) life imprisonment and pr(it doesn't) death penalty. That is, it's ambiguous, and cheaper. I expect that the 'cheaper' part will convince taxpayers to support it, convince prison lobbies to fight it, and the ambiguity will let all the politicians support it.

[-][anonymous]14y00

No.

But mostly this.

[-]lsparrish14y00

This is a good question... If you see it as punishment of an evil person, it follows that they should be denied cryonics for the same reason they are being killed.

But if you believe in rehabilitation, thinking of the criminal behavior as the result of a mental illness, cryonics is a good thing because they are being sent forward to a time when their mental disease can be cured.

It would be interesting to see what would happen from a political standpoint if a death row inmate were to express a wish for cryonics. Has anyone tried sending literature on cryonics to condemned criminals?

[-]ata14y110

It would be interesting to see what would happen from a political standpoint if a death row inmate were to express a wish for cryonics. Has anyone tried sending literature on cryonics to condemned criminals?

That would indeed be interesting, particularly because it would be a good test of how seriously people take cryonics when they're not motivated to deny the possibility of its success (to explain why they don't want to sign up, or why it wouldn't have been any use in saving the life of a loved one, etc.) — we'd see how many of them seemed to be seriously worried about the death row convicts coming back someday.

[-]Eugine_Nier14y30

Suppose you believe that final death is an appropriate punishment for someone's crime. You also believe cryonics has probability p of working, where p is too small for you to sign up for cryonics. Should you allow the prisoner to be frozen?

If cryonics doesn't work, it doesn't make a difference; and if cryonics does, you shouldn't. Thus there is no reason to allow the prisoner to sign up for cryonics.

Notice that this conclusion doesn't depend on the probability of cryonics working, or on how certain you are the prisoner is guilty, for any certainty sufficient to justify him being executed.

[-]wedrifid14y20

That would indeed be interesting, particularly because it would be a good test of how seriously people take cryonics when they're not motivated to deny the possibility of its success (to explain why they don't want to sign up, or why it wouldn't have been any use in saving the life of a loved one, etc.) — we'd see how many of them seemed to be seriously worried about the death row convicts coming back someday.

[-]David_Gerard14y00

And the important thing is the presupposition that this is a matter worth discussion in the public arena.

[-]Eugine_Nier14y20

Note that from the point of view of deterrent it doesn't mater whether cryonics works or not as long as the criminal believes it will.

[-]ata14y60

True... so anyone who really wants to increase the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent should be promoting atheism. :)

[-]Eugine_Nier14y100

Of course, it's even more effective to promote the belief that sinners will spend eternity burning in hell.

[-][anonymous]14y00

Especially if one also promotes that those executed are instantly sinners.

[-]wedrifid14y10

This is a good question... If you see it as punishment of an evil person, it follows that they should be denied cryonics for the same reason they are being killed.

I would not necessarily say it follows. Sentencing someone to information death is a whole different level of punishment than sentencing them to execution. In most cases even historically the soon to be executed criminals are allowed to see a priest. This suggest that the intended punishment is not usually eternal in nature.

[-]lsparrish14y30

Sure, but cryonics isn't religious, it's medical. Like doing CPR on the patient. And information death is what happens with the current death penalty. Taking away information death would be changing the punishment's essential nature.

[-]wedrifid14y10

Sure, but cryonics isn't religious, it's medical.

It is action taken based off premises. It indicates intent. Those instigating the punishment quite clearly do not intend for it to go beyond the cessation of all function in the body.

And information death is what happens with the current death penalty. Taking away information death would be changing the punishment's essential nature.

The current death penalty doesn't talk about cryonic preservation at all much less incorporate it as part of the essential nature. It is current death - and the cremation or burial of bodies rather than preservation - that results in information death.

Prohibiting cryonics is not the default state, the status quo. It would be an additional punishment.

[-]lsparrish14y-20

Those instigating the punishment quite clearly do not intend for it to go beyond the cessation of all function in the body.

This is not clear to me. It could just as easily be that the intent is for the person's memories to be completely erased from the body in order that the person would not be able to return to life and commit the same crimes again. Otherwise it would not be as much of a punishment.

Prohibiting cryonics is not the default state, the status quo. It would be an additional punishment.

From a legal rights standpoint perhaps this is correct. But from an actual action-taken standpoint, it isn't. The status quo for a condemned criminal is to die and rot. If condemned criminals started doing cryonics, it would be a disruption in this pattern. Those in favor of the status quo of condemned criminals dying and rotting would be against this and in favor of regulating cryonics to prevent it.

[-]Eugine_Nier14y00

The main point of punishment is to deter crime, rehabilitation is secondary. One to think of this using TDT is that the point of punishment is to acausally prevent crime. I discussed this in a slightly different context here.

As to whether a criminal should be allowed to sign up for cryonics, that depends on what the appropriate level of punishment for his crime is. After all, we assign some criminals 10 years in jail, others life, and execute still others.

As the question of mental illness, as Yvain points out in Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease.

Instead of continuing the fruitless "disease" argument, we should address these questions directly. Taking a determinist consequentialist position allows us to do so more effectively. We should blame and stigmatize people for conditions where blame and stigma are the most useful methods for curing or preventing the condition, and we should allow patients to seek treatment whenever it is available and effective.

[-][anonymous]14y-10

No. If the prisoner has not received the death penalty and wants to pay the full cost of his/her cryopreservation he should be able to do so. By law, criminal sentence and any pending criminal prosecution ends immediately when the prisoner dies.

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