Hard Time: Really as effective a punishment?

[Egger]

It was bound to happen: Prisoners 'could serve 1,000 year sentence in eight hours'. I believe this raises serious questions about how authorities would choose to let prisoners use (or waste) their time. Even if the experience of long periods of isolation are all they experience, how much better would it be if they come out with severe psychological trauma.

Exactly. We should rehabilitate people and try to solve the problems that make people become criminal in the first place instead of devising new ways to punish, torment and torture them.

 

[Victory Is Life]

Maybe the sim-hoosgow was so invasive that it creates enough of an impression that it stays with you enough to override awareness of space/time. Regardless of how long it takes, if it's so powerful, the toll it takes on the psyche is more profound than the passage of time. In my eyes, you would need to have heightened levels of mental conditioning to overcome the effects of such a punishment, like perhaps a Vulcan, though I doubt a Vulcan would ever end up in an Agrathi court.