Typical legal treatment within the Terran state

By far the most common legal treatment within the Terran state is capital punishment.  Agent and Untenable monitoring can go on for years or decades before dispensing with punishment, but once a complete case is made before the appropriate boards, the judgment can be carried out by remote satellite engagement.  Usually this falls in the form of a simple orbital laser used in a precision strike against the target.

Because of effective Agent (and occasionally direct Untenable) involvement, large scale corruption, while no less common than in any human system, is easily managed once found.  Procedures vary, from turning the illegal practices into legal businesses and then running competition out of business, to simply liquidating the entire corrupt system.  From time to time extreme measures need to be taken and those known to be uninvolved are evacuated from the state (which can vary in size from simply cities up to entire planets) and the guilty parties are then treated on their own (again, by varying means, though in these cases usually by liquidation.)

Less dire, but still serious crime is dealt with on a so-called “fine or seizure” process.  The Fine or Seizure process usually charges those suspected of criminal activity some amount depending on the level of the crime.  Normal fines are around 1/3 the cost the person would accrue by taking the case to a legal court, which thus motivates them to simply pay the fine instead of dealing with court fees.  Felony crimes fall under “Seizure” and usually are dealt with by taking something (or things) of value to the person.  This varies on the individual.  Many times the only thing that a person values enough to deal with is their own person, and so some body part is removed.  Additionally, they then undergo gene therapy to disallow simple reattachment of said body part.

Minimal crime usually involves tattooing warning messages in obvious places (say, “Arsonist) on the person’s forehead.  These tattoos are also gene-encoded, so any attempt to remove then would be far beyond the expendable money available to most people found committing such crimes.

The State runs only two types of prisons, Impregnable level and Ultra-maximum security prisons.  Lesser prisons are left to the individual governing bodies, though prisons of lesser levels only occur on extremely high population level planets.  Imprisonment is seen as an ineffective means of punishment within the State and is only used in rare cases.  Most State-run prisons are built in deep space, far outside of solar systems and usually off well traveled routes.  Their locations are kept secret and as a whole, efforts are made to hide the facilities by placing them within nebulas or other naturally occurring stellar phenomenon.  (Some have been built within the outer layers of particularly cool stars, or even deep within super-Jovian planets.)

Impregnable security prison

All prisoners are kept secure with multiple layers of encasement.  Impregnable level security is monitored exclusively by Agents, and prisoners are non-active for the duration of their sentence (which is usually several hundred years long.)  Prisoners are frozen within exterior 15 inches of water ice after their body temperature is reduced to 63 degrees Kelvin.  These blocks of ice are then placed within a layer of fixed-state phased energy.  Finally they are secured within a time-dilatation field.

Once imprisoned, there is no grounds for appeal or early release.  All prisoners serve their full term and are then released.  The term is built into the dilation field as well as the energy shell both of which decay at rates built into their individual resonance.  These decay rates are determined by the sentence to be served.  To dispel the fields early, an outsider would need to know the exact time (down to variations at a quantum level) when they would collapse and use the rate to then disrupt the fields.  Exact release times are unknown once the initial fields are set as the data is built into the generators which are housed within the fields themselves.

To date, after serving over 1.18 E 19 prisoners during almost 32,000 years of activity, no prisoner has ever died, escaped, or been released early after the term has begun.

Ultra maximum security prisons in Terran space

To protect prisoners from one another, they are housed in single rooms, which the prisoners only leave when frozen inside 15 inches of ice.  These rooms are unconnected and suspended at least twice their own distance from another room.  Generally, they only leave to be transferred between rooms.  Ideally, the desire is to be placed in a room with someone whom the prisoner trusts and gets along with socially as they will be the prisoner's exclusive contact(s).  Roommate changes are relatively easy to acquire and almost never denied.

Prisoners are kept in cell groups of 2-5 depending on preference.  Generally two prisoners to a room.  Prison uniform is a single body covering phased energy shell, which is bonded to the skin and nervous system.  For all intents and purposes, the energy shell is unbreakable.  The shell is generated with 3 levels of redundancy which go up one after the other within a pico-second of failure.  The first is a locally generated field built into each cell.  The generators are outside the rooms and are also protected by similarly impregnable phased energy shells.  The second level is generated by the entire prison system from semi-local and global systems.  The third level is built into the subject’s abdominal cavity and uses a combination of body heat and blood processing to maintain the field in the unlikely event that the first two levels fail.  The internal system can maintain the field for almost twenty three minutes before placing the subject in any possible danger from nutrient deprivation.

These fields can be dropped at the discretion of the presiding warden, though this is very rare.  Only in extreme medical situations would this need to be done, and even then, it is more likely that a local time-dilation field would be erected to stop time for the subject until medical treatment becomes available.  The phased energy shells have systems integrated into them which deal with personal hygiene and excrement removal.

Despite being immune to bladed or piercing injury because of the shells placed around them, prisoners are still susceptible to blunt injury, though the shell does reduce the damage done by a factor of 6.  Because of the large amount of force needed, effective active monitoring procedures, and logical analysis, it can easily be distinguished when a prisoner attempts to injure another or when it is simply accident.  Punishment varies, but usually follows similarly to the “Seizure” aspect of the “Fine and Seizure” policy for serious crime.  Some body part will be taken, and work is made to ensure it is a body part which the individual will miss.  (Common body parts removed are facial features, digits, hand(s), a food (or feet), or even entire limbs.)  In greater cases, the individual is simply executed on the spot.

To protect prisoners from abuse, at least one of the higher level executive officers will be an Agent.  Usually this is not the warden.  In some cases where extreme corruption was suspected, entire staff have slowly been rotated out for Agents to isolate the problem(s).