Best Served Cold

  

 

Six years is all it took, from the moment it was created, until the end of the rule of law.

Just writing that sentence, I instinctively feel it should come with a hyperbole disclaimer, but it really can’t. It’s completely true. It was a hazardous beast, a Pandora’s box that once opened, spelled the end of civilised society. And because of ethics and our moral codes, ironically it was something that couldn’t be undone.

Six years ago, a group of neuroscientists and engineers working in Madrid happened upon something. If I said it was by accident I would be lying, because for the last three years before then, they had been trying on the very issue it solved. They had managed to turn bad into good.

On paper, it was such an elegant idea. Take a criminal who’s acts considered them beyond psychological repair, and turn their instinctive bad behaviour into something completely proper; make them a provably functioning member of society. Once exposed to the device, every examination, every uncheatable test that would be thrown at them to gauge their sincerity and nicety, they would pass with flying colours.

The device almost made them into a completely different person, but their memories and individuality still remained intact. The serial killer who remembered going fishing with his dad as a kid, would still remember it, but sans the killing tendencies. It didn’t change what they remembered, or what they thought of themselves, it just changed desire. No longer did the serial rapist feel urges when in the presence of young, beautiful women. He had become someone capable of truly having a meaningful, long-term relationship with a woman he believed he loved; and he did.

These feelings weren’t a trick to the patient; they were as real as any good emotion or thought in any normal person. They were a completely rehabilitated, functioning member of society, and here is where the problem laid. With the press of a button, a bad person can become good.

In a just and civilised society, as the Supreme Court ruled several months after the device’s announcement, the purpose of the prison system is for rehabilitating those convicted of crimes into proper members of society. Previously, time served and community service constituted that rehabilitation, but now it could be done with a machine in just a couple of hours.

The problem with this fact wasn’t that some people truly wanted to see certain criminals rot in prison for life. Yes, it’s true that the mother of a murdered daughter would see her killer walk in and out of a prison cell on the same day. But this wasn’t the concern that ripped society apart. The real problem laid in the elimination of deterrent.

If I, a previously good and upstanding citizen, decided that I had become to despise my neighbour with every fibre of my being, what would stop me from acting on that hatred? I knew that if I felt like it, I could cross my lawn, open his front door, and shoot him dead. While i’m at, if I felt so inclined afterword and found I liked the feeling of killing, I might finish off the family that stood screaming and paralysed in the living room.

What would my punishment be? Before I even pulled that trigger, I knew all that would happen is a speedy conviction (I would plead guilty), and a quick trip to the rehab machine. That night, I would go back to my house, knowing I no longer felt any desire to kill again, and yet my neighbour issue would be solved. I would get to have my cake and eat it, too.

This above scenario was an issue that many had tried to solve in the months and years after the machine’s invention. After all this time however, the public found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place. Firstly, the device couldn’t be taken back or removed from the system. After all, what civilised society would take away something with such provably rehabilitating power? If they banned the device outright, it would be saying to the world that governments didn’t care about the citizen in prison, or the safety of those on the outside. If someone served time with the traditional prison system, you could never be absolutely sure that they were a changed man; this system removed all doubt.

Secondly, and something which would greatly impact the motivation of the soon-to-be-offending criminal, the justice system could only perfectly guarantee the rights of the person after leaving prison. Legally, the court of public opinion could not discriminate on such offenders. If a multiple murderer left prison after using the machine, a potential employer couldn’t use that conviction as reason for denying a job. After all, the person that stood in front of them was not the cold-hearted killer that committed murder just last week. Yes, their memories were completely intact, but their motivation, their inclination and their attitudes were now completely different.

To judge someone on the acts of what was, practically speaking another person, would be completely unethical, and therefore now illegal; This, the would-be criminals knew. They would be free to commit any number of atrocious acts with nothing more than a slap on the wrist to see them off. Legally, nothing could be done to them afterword, and they would love it.

But that is only half of the story. In the end, legally, nothing could be done to them, but was is law when there is no justice? Those who were wronged by the actions of these criminals knew that there would also be no punishment for revenge. An eye for an eye would make the whole world blind in the years that followed, and it was the clean and moral society that allowed it to happen, because they could do no other.