[ WP ] Prison terms of `` life plus '' take on new meaning after transfer of consciousness to computer databanks leads to functional immortality . A moral and ethical outcry erupts after the first case in which an individual is sentenced to prison for one hundred thousand years .

So we uploaded the prisoners consciousness. That was n't a bad idea -- after all, it was cheaper than physically housing them. 
 
 But then the politicians started getting angry about the simulation. After all, why were we simulating a pleasant environment? These are criminals. They should be in pits of despair. 
 
 So we made a simulated hell of a torturous existence. The minds would stay in for their terms before being erased from existence. 
 
 But then we got the first sentence for 100,000 years. As if we're going to run a simulation for 100,000 years. The answer became very simple -- all we needed to do was overclock the sim -- time would rush as far as we could tell. So, that just meant a simple upload procedure, and a few minutes of sim time and we could have 100,000 years completed, so we could then delete the sim and move on to the next felon. 
 
 And after we have finally perfected this, what do we hear now? `` Could n't we just execute them instead?'' 
 
 What, and go back to those barbaric times?
