At the University of Oxford, a team of scholars led by the philosopher Rebecca Roache has begun thinking about the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment. In January, I spoke with Roache and her colleagues Anders Sandberg and Hannah Maslen about emotional enhancement, ‘supercrimes’, and the ethics of eternal damnation. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation.
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It might not look much, but the Sony SRF-39FP pocket AM/FM radio is regarded as the audio player of choice in prisons across the US.
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There have been plenty of civil cases against architects over the years, for all manner of negligence. But, today, an extremely rare criminal case was decided: An architect was sentenced to a year in LA county jail after pleading no contest to the manslaughter of a firefighter who died while trying to contain a fire in a home the architect had designed for himself.
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Necessity is the mother of invention, and invention is the father of designing things that you can fit into your butt to sneak them into prison. And so a phone shaped exactly like a small butt plug has come into our world, and the UK government is trying to ban it.
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A Florida prison says that a computer "glitch" is to blame after all of the doors in the maximum security wing opened without warning. Wired has news for them, though. Sometimes, these kinds of glitches are caused by sneaky characters called hackers. And this situation looks pretty suspect.
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Most movie marketing is all about creating cool looking posters and teasing us with short trailers, but there is some clever marketing happening in Taiwan for Star Trek Into Darkness. Check out Benedict Cumberbatch locked in his cell in the Ximending Shopping District.
All of the passers-by are probably wondering why this guy was locked up and why an entire prison cell was transported off the Enterprise and back into time.
With this campaign they are really thinking outside of the box. Or maybe I should say cell.
[via Sketchlock via The Mary Sue]
If necessity is the mother of invention, prison cells must be veritable hotbeds of creativity—and not just for making wine in toilets or tattoo guns from Bic pens and guitar strings. According to three Italian designers who’ve been holding design workshops with prisoners since 2003, the incarcerated are brilliant lifehacks. And we can learn from them. More »
When one of Britain’s biggest cyber criminals was jailed in 2011, officials thought they’d be safe from his internet attacks. But then he managed to sneak into a prison computer class and hack the jail’s network. More »
A Canadian judge has ruled that police must provide accused, arrested individuals with internet access so that they can find a lawyer. But do you agree? More »
When I went to prison, in 1987, Motorola manufactured the large, gray cellphone that I used. People referred to it as “the brick.” It had the capacity to send or receive phone calls, but there wasn’t any text messaging back then. More »
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