Do prison planets make sense?

[sirocco]

All sorts of flaws with that line of argument. For one, there's no mention of "natives" to do any bargaining with. Second, the kind of constant contact you are talking about not only contradicts what Stormin was describing, but it would need to include a lot more than "basic harmless technology" in order to keep the "wardens" from being overrun and slaughtered as collaborators. It's guaranteed that the people stranded there are going to be very, very angry; you don't want to set yourself up as something they can take their rage out on. And weather & communication satellites aren't going to help "control" a local populace that can just ignore them and who won't trust them. "Controlling every aspect of their lives" sounds like pretty much the opposite of the "bottle them up and ignore them" scenario Stormin was talking about anyway.

What I meant by Natives are at least grandchildren of your first convicts i.e people who consider that planet as being their home.

It's true that they would blame and hate you for dumping new inmates whenever you feel like it. But as someone pointed it out before they are humans and therefore need to build a functional society. So they need too to keep in check the new guys and either integrate them or get rid of them as efficiently as possible. And you represent the best solution.

The satellites will help them check the neighbor settlements, the movement of the newcomers, communicate all over the planet, have enough statistics on weather to improve harvesting, etc. etc. And all the settlements with access to wireless communication will be using them.

On your part you just need to put them on automatic mode and check every now and then that they didn't get past rocket technology phase. Heck you could watch them from another planet.

Your evil empire may be their enemy but well they are very far away while the wilderness and the crazy guys running loose next to their home.

[someone_else]

It would certainly have its own government, a police force, competent medical facilities, etc, just like any other world.

Much better. The way I understand what you wrote here, that's a civilized world with its own (relatively small) free population whose main natural resource is "keeping prisoners for lots of other planets" and "running fabs where such prisoners work".
A real-world equivalent would be a small city where most of the population works in a prison or in the logistics for it anyway.

I doubt most prisoners you dump there will be able to come up with a government and (especially) with medical facilities and any kind of industry on their own. Because most of the people you bring there are semi-illitterates, sore losers and violent scum, expecting them to come up with anything better than a feudal-like structure is dreaming imho. Not that feudal structures are so bad anyway for productivity.
Also because their "prison time" would be relatively short.

And, of course, the companies would do their best to ensure order and productivity, so there would probably be less violence than in the current prison systems.

This is just like the slave's conditions in the US, when they were easy to replace (i.e. they were still imported from Africa) they lived in bad conditions, when they weren't so easy to replace (i.e. import stopped) their conditions improved.
So their conditions will depend on how easy is to be punished with Prison Planet.
That means if Prison Planet's survival rates aren't deemed human enough by the courts, the number of new inmates will start to decrease and they will have to increase living standards to keep manned all their fabs.
Sounds air-tight.

[Havok]

A prison planet for one planet is ridiculous.

With a population of almost what, almost 7 Billion now, only around 9 million people are in the prison/jail/court systems. You want to waste an entire fucking planet on 9 million? That's the population of NYC. You make a prison colony on a moon, or a group of orbital stations or find a big island or small continent for 9 million.

Given the societal advances to the point where a prison planet would even be possible, I doubt that the number would even be that high. (At least I hope it wouldn't)

The examples given of incarcerating what amounts to inter-stellar POWs may justify it, but the expense to move what would amount to an entire worlds population to one planet seems prohibitive. Just blockade the planet(s) they are already on. Call it jail and call it a day.

And if you did decide to stupidly waste an entire planet on the dregs of society, you may find that they stop becoming dregs.
Most crime is driven by poverty and wanting what others have. You take that away and set everyone to zero, which is effectively what you are doing, and give these people a fresh start on their own planet, you are going to find that the extreme cases i.e. the crazy murderers, rapists, child molesters, are going to be killed off and the rest of the 'normal' criminals will form a sort of a hierarchical system based on intelligence, strength and respect. Which is how every society starts at it's base.

[Eternal_Freedom]

If the serious criminals are removed by the moderate/low level offenders and they then form a new and decent society, then surely it would be an effective form of rehabilitation?

[fgalkin]

It would certainly have its own government, a police force, competent medical facilities, etc, just like any other world.

Much better. The way I understand what you wrote here, that's a civilized world with its own (relatively small) free population whose main natural resource is "keeping prisoners for lots of other planets" and "running fabs where such prisoners work".
A real-world equivalent would be a small city where most of the population works in a prison or in the logistics for it anyway.

I doubt most prisoners you dump there will be able to come up with a government and (especially) with medical facilities and any kind of industry on their own. Because most of the people you bring there are semi-illitterates, sore losers and violent scum, expecting them to come up with anything better than a feudal-like structure is dreaming imho. Not that feudal structures are so bad anyway for productivity.
Also because their "prison time" would be relatively short.

If you have a setting that advanced, much of the stuff could be automated. For an extra bonus, the people sent to the prison planet may be required to undergo training and leave better educated and more productive than they had been.

And, of course, the companies would do their best to ensure order and productivity, so there would probably be less violence than in the current prison systems.

This is just like the slave's conditions in the US, when they were easy to replace (i.e. they were still imported from Africa) they lived in bad conditions, when they weren't so easy to replace (i.e. import stopped) their conditions improved.
So their conditions will depend on how easy is to be punished with Prison Planet.
That means if Prison Planet's survival rates aren't deemed human enough by the courts, the number of new inmates will start to decrease and they will have to increase living standards to keep manned all their fabs.
Sounds air-tight.

More like US company towns, where the employees were effectively indentured to the company that owned everything, from the houses the people lived in to the goods on store shelves. They would then be paid in company scrips which were redeemable only in company stores. I imagine the sentences would be actually longer than those we would get today, with the option to continue working for the company on a permanent, paid contract afterward.

Violent offenders, on the other hand, would probably end up being early settlers on newly colonized planets, building stuff where there were none and dealing with the friendly fauna and microorganisms, or carrying out the early terraforming efforts.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Havok]

If the serious criminals are removed by the moderate/low level offenders and they then form a new and decent society, then surely it would be an effective form of rehabilitation?

Not out of context. You bring them back to the society they came from, and they go right back to where they were. Probably poor, no opportunities etc., but keep them in the context where they all have the same thing and yeah, you may come across a rehabilitated group after a time.

And don't confuse 'serious' with extreme. Most criminals, especially those that warrant prison over jail or some form of probation are serious criminals. There is however a segment of violent offenders that are just not tolerated anywhere, including prison. That is why they have separation from General Population in prisons.

Child molesters, child murderers, rapists, cannibals etc. don't tend to last long when mixed in with the 'normal' criminals.

[Stormin]

In the Night's Dawn trilogy there are prison planets. It seemed the common method of using them was have families deported there until either 1 million prisoners have been set down or 100 years have passed. After that, bottle the place up for a couple centuries and then admit the planet into the confederacy.
Even criminals would need to form a proper government and the psychopaths would quickly be dealt with by the far larger number of people who just want to live the rest of their lives as well as they can. After the couple centuries are up the place has become a world that just needs some investment to bring the technology and industry back up to galactic standards.

The problem I see with that is that realistically, the result would be a society whose founding ideals center around the confederacy being evil. Every time someone suffered or died because they didn't have access to "galactic standard technology and industry", they and everyone around them would know that it's only happening because the confederacy is punishing them for something their ancestors did. That would keep the hatred alive over the generations; the confederacy would be "those bastards who left us here to rot", a bogeyman and whipping boy for everything wrong with the world. How popular would England be with the Australians if they'd transported convicts there, then to this day they'd kept up a blockade on Australia?

Admitting planets full of people who hate your collective guts (and have good reason to, so the attitude won't go away) isn't going to do much good for your society's stability.

It's actually a point mentioned in the book. The Naked God Part 2: Faith. Page 767

There was never any contact between the Confederation at large and Traslov, in that every flight was strictly one way: down. The theory was simple enough. Prisoners, voluntarily accompanied by their family, were shot down into the equatorial band of continent not covered by glaciers. Sociologists, hired by participating governments to reassure civil rights organizations, claimed that if enough people were brought together they'd inevitably form a stable community. After a hundred years, or a million people, whichever came first, the flights would be stopped. The communities would expand in the wake of the retreating glaciers. And in another hundred years a self-sustaining agrarian civilization would emerge with a modest industrial capacity, at which point they'd be allowed to join the confederation and develop like a normal colony. As yet, no one had found out if an ex-penal colony would want to join a society which had exiled every one of their ancestors.

There are five such worlds mentioned to have been moved to the spot outside the galaxy that the rest of the Confederation had been put.

I really don't see what a world would gain from refusing to join the rest of the human galaxy after being invited. Your ancestors might have been exiles but you are not going to do any good by making your descendants live in a stagnant backwater.

[Havok]

Do these authors really expect people to believe that entire planets would be wasted on 1 million people? And condemning families to go with them? What the fuck is this nonsense?

[Stormin]

Voluntarily accompanied by their families. And 1 million people is more than enough to start a colony, once the world is independent they can set whatever immigration policy they want.

A million is a nice round number, large but not unreachable given the timeframe they set themselves (100 years). There's also no shortage of habitable worlds in the setting, in fact one planet was going to be set aside for five (iirc) members of Al Capone's gang who had a special deal negotiated. Granted, the world's population would be back to zero in a few years after the cancers caused by the Reality Dysfunction effect got them.

[Rossum]

Hmm, how about this:

The inmates actually are the Evil Empires idea for colonizing other planets.

The Empire is composed of numerous industrialized worlds which have all had their entire cultures homogenized into a big stupid mess. Consider modern Earth with our TV, Religion, Internet, "News" programs, and politics. We have all these stupid memes and stuff spreading around in internet culture, religions that reward people for making logically bullshit argument, societies and customs that likely will never die, and enough bread and circuses sent around to keep people content enough to not riot or really get angry when government officials do stupid shit.

When the Empire industrializes a planet and sets up the Internet and big shopping malls and stuff then people get too distracted with it to really pay attention to the physical world and the industry keeps enough people fat and happy despite ecological or other damages that result from stuff. In effect, every Empire world eventually become a stupid corrupt hellhole and nobody has figured out a way to "clean them up" without completely destroying the industrialized worlds economy and getting everyone pissed off.

So, they constantly colonize new planets... but none of their citizens really want to leave the comfort of their smelly cities with internet and Wal-Marts to live in a wild planet with animals that might think they are yummy. And setting up industrialized cities on these pristine planets tends to get stupid idiots fucking things up.

So, the "show they care about crime" and round up all the dregs of society and people who don't fit in the system and send them off to these pristine uncorrupted worlds. Sure, few of them know how to survive in an unindustrialized world... but there will be some who will find out how to do so. Dump enough yahoos on a planet and eventually they'll figure out how to survive in that condition and form tribes or cultures and hopefully they will form cultures different than the origional world they came from but still have one that can survive in the new planet.

They might start a matriarcal society free of the problems of the old patriarcal one.

The could have a culture centered around the scientific method instead of religion.

Or any number of things. Sure, there would be alot of stupid stuff, but its likely that the smarter or stronger ones would develop funtioning societies faster than the stupid ones.

After a few generations without any real contact from the Empire (aside from new prisoners being dumped there) then you'll have a planet full of people who don't really care what happened on The Simpsons or who have to deal with whatever some idiot pop culture dude or politician said. They'd be sampling the vegetation on an alien planet and figuring out how to make medicines out of them, or making weapons and military cultures to keep other people from messing with them.

After a while longer than the prison planet starts forming kingdoms and empires with their own cultures mostly formed from scratch. Empire scientists examine whats been going on and take notes on the cultures formed before the Empire diplomats decide to declare the former Prison Planet to be an official part of the Empire.

The current generation on the planet says "Screw you! You dumped our ancestors on this rock for stupid reasons!"

The Empire says "It doesn't matter if we're idiots, we've got guns in orbit."

Then the Empire declares the new planet to be part of the Empire and initiates trade and immigration. The new planet gets a bunch of cool medicine and scientific advancements (along with crap that slowly turns their brains into mush), the rest of the Empire gets to sift through the cultures of countless civilizations formed by prisoners dumped on an inhospitable planet so they can make caricatures of them in childrens cartoons. And various talking heads and politicians can give all kinds of speeches about whatever the octopus living in their head tells them to talk about.


So the prison planets are less about punishing people or paying any sort of debt to society and more about seeing how the human race of that generation reacts to being separated from its technology and culture and has to start a new culture from scratch. Then the resulting cultures are assimilated into the collective consciousness of the Empire to hopefully make it better.

[Lord of the Abyss]

It's actually a point mentioned in the book. The Naked God Part 2: Faith. Page 767

There was never any contact between the Confederation at large and Traslov, in that every flight was strictly one way: down. The theory was simple enough. Prisoners, voluntarily accompanied by their family, were shot down into the equatorial band of continent not covered by glaciers. Sociologists, hired by participating governments to reassure civil rights organizations, claimed that if enough people were brought together they'd inevitably form a stable community. After a hundred years, or a million people, whichever came first, the flights would be stopped. The communities would expand in the wake of the retreating glaciers. And in another hundred years a self-sustaining agrarian civilization would emerge with a modest industrial capacity, at which point they'd be allowed to join the confederation and develop like a normal colony. As yet, no one had found out if an ex-penal colony would want to join a society which had exiled every one of their ancestors.

There are five such worlds mentioned to have been moved to the spot outside the galaxy that the rest of the Confederation had been put.

I really don't see what a world would gain from refusing to join the rest of the human galaxy after being invited. Your ancestors might have been exiles but you are not going to do any good by making your descendants live in a stagnant backwater.

Joining a society composed of your enemies, ones that clearly regard you and everyone you know as basically subhuman is a recipe for abuse or exploitation. Nor do I think that the larger society would actually mean what they say about letting the exiles rejoin, since that's an obvious recipe for long term terrorism and general dissension. A society whose entire history revolves around how they were exiled and suffered horrible deprivation because of "those bastards in the sky" is never going to be friendly. Life in a primitive society is horrible, and all that horror is going to be laid at the feet of those who did the exiling.

[Sky Captain]

I guess it really depends on how expensive is shipping prisoners to a prison planet vs keeping them in regular prison on their home planet. If say longer than 10 years in regular prison is more expensive than shipping and dumping long term prisoners on some remote planet then prison planet might be viable. If habitable planets are abundant there are also going to be plenty of barely habitable planets - with extreme axial tilt making extreme climate, resource poor, with hostile wildlife, too cold or too hot, mostly glaciated, mostly ocean - pick your choice for best prison planet.
Designating a barely habitable planet as a prison planet wouldn't be big loss for the Epmire because such planet wouldn't be of much use anyway.
Besides a prison planet wouldn't make an entire system unusable - you could sill mine whatever asteorids or other planets/moons there are. In fact mining operation could make shipping a prisoners even cheaper because all it would take is attaching a prison module to inbound freighter. A company running a mining operation there could even make some extra profit that way.

[aussiemuscle308]

In a way, it'd be like shipping convicts to the other end of the world during the age of sail.

yes, make fun of the australians.

alcatraz had a good escape proof system

the only weakness of a planet-wide prison is stopping the prisoners building ships or being picked up by one.

[sirocco]

In a way, it'd be like shipping convicts to the other end of the world during the age of sail.

yes, make fun of the australians.

alcatraz had a good escape proof system

the only weakness of a planet-wide prison is stopping the prisoners building ships or being picked up by one.

For the latter, that's right but the former I just can't buy it. Just look currently at our difficulties for making a working spacecraft (to transport people of course) to get to the Moon and the whole industry needed for it. I just can't believe that convicts on a pristine world could just make one out of thin air and that even if they are geniuses. I'm not even talking of the individual risk of getting attacked/mugged by your fellow inmates.

Though they could always steal one from their warden (if any). And even in that case nothing forbid your surveillance satellite from shooting that particular ship. It's not like it will make an instantaneous take-off.

So finally the problem is if someone else decides to come to retrieve the convicts. He'd need to be able to fend off any spatial and ground defense too.

Note that this only applies in case of semi-hard scifi. In softer versions, they could just attempt the inconceivable by opening an hyperspace window inside the atmosphere

[Purple]

Well if you are in softer SF why not just build an orbiting guard station armed to the teeth and have it project a force field around the planet? Think Endor moon and Death Star just in reverse.

[PREDATOR490]

Naturally the avenue for any outside component to interfere with the system exists and cannot be truely removed entirely.

Without that component, prisoners stuck on a planet are highly unlikely to be able to do shit to escape. Even if the prisoners cobble together enough resources to build a technological society. It is likely it will be detected and erradicated before they get to the 'making spaceships' stage. The implementation of automated defences and sentries would make a prison planet more feasible. Anything from Robocop to Terminator level automation should be enough.

[Enigma]

An idea I have for one of my stories is that instead of prison planets there would be a moon sized artificial construct designed to "digitize" (reduce a person to ones and zeroes) and download them into the construct. Inside the virtual world, the inmates would serve their sentences and their environment would be tailored to their crimes (i.e. those who committed crimes deserving of a "minimal security" setting would live in a quasi-boot camp while those in a "super-max" would live in a hell-world virtual environment).

The risks of dying in the virtual world are very real. Getting killed from a shanking while in the virtual prison would be permanent. There is no rebooting of the criminal.

There would be failsafes (attempting to hack the construct could cause it to digitize the hacker into the virtual hell-world, or a power surge feedback back to the hacker, etc...) and the construct is heavily armored and heavily armed should someone decide to hack in and free a comrade.

One could digitize in as many people into the construct as long as it has the HD capacity to hold it and still function. Of course, the virtual prison is mod-able so it could be upgraded whenever it is needed.

The idea I had of digitizing people wasn't from funny enough, Digimon but a late 80's - early 90's TV series about a battle in a post apocalyptic Earth between a rebel faction (led by some dude called Captain ?? [forgot the name]) against a fat cyborg emperor who tends to have people digitized. The emperor has robots that have a glowing center that was an obvious weak point for the rebels.

While the virtual world idea I got from Digimon.

The show I was referring to was Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future

[Stormin]

the only weakness of a planet-wide prison is stopping the prisoners building ships or being picked up by one.

Building a spacecraft is a major expense in terms of infrastructure so a LOT of people would have to be working full time to get a very few off the planet. What are they going to do after that though? Unless they can capture an FTL capable ship they did not improve their situation at all.

As for being rescued, there would probably be enough defenses to stop one or two ships from coming in and picking someone up. It would be crazy to use a prison planet to imprison someone who has enough money or pull for a fleet to come and pick them up. Those sort of people would probably be kept in a much easier to defend place.

[Simon_Jester]

Generally, anyone with that kind of pull can't be imprisoned until their power to summon fleets is broken. Think of Napoleon on Elba and St. Helena.

[MKSheppard]

Do these authors really expect people to believe that entire planets would be wasted on 1 million people?

It all depends on the setting. If planets in the relative goldilocks zone for human habitability are pretty rare, then prison installations would be airless moons or places requiring external life support (breather/filter masks).

But if human goldilocks zone planets are literally falling out of the galaxy's ass to the point where they're as common as dirt...they will win out over the airless moon/harsh world due to lower economics -- you can plop someone down onto the planet, and not have to pay for their oxygen/scrubber system.