Closed-Loop Brain Devices in Offender Rehabilitation: Autonomy, Human Rights, and Accountability

The current debate on closed-loop brain devices (CBDs) focuses on their use in a medical context; possible criminal justice applications have not received scholarly attention. Unlike in medicine, in criminal justice, CBDs might be offered on behalf of the State and for the purpose of protecting security, rather than realising healthcare aims. It would be possible to deploy CBDs in the rehabilitation of convicted offenders, similarly to the much-debated possibility of employing other brain interventions in this context. Although such use of CBDs could in principle be consensual, there are significant differences between the choice faced by a criminal offender offered a CBD in the context of criminal justice, and that faced by a patient offered a CBD in an ordinary healthcare context. Employment of CBDs in criminal justice thus raises ethical and legal intricacies not raised by healthcare applications. This paper examines some of these issues under three heads: autonomy, human rights, and accountability

Legal insanity and risk:An international perspective on the justification of indeterminate preventive commitment

Particle-laden gravity flows, called turbidity currents, flow through river-like channels across the ocean floor. These submarine channels funnel sediment, nutrients, pollutants and organic carbon into ocean basins and can extend for over 1000’s of kilometers. Upon reaching the end of these channels, flows lose their confinement, decelerate, and deposit their sediment load; this is what we read in textbooks. However, sea floor observations have shown the opposite: turbidity currents tend to erode the seafloor upon losing confinement. Here we use a state-of-the-art scaling method to produce the first experimental turbidity currents that erode upon leaving a channel. The experiments reveal a novel flow mechanism, here called flow relaxation, that explains this erosion. Flow relaxation is rapid flow deformation resulting from the loss of confinement, which enhances basal shearing of the turbidity current and leads to scouring. This flow mechanism plays a key role in the propagation of submarine channel systems

Legal insanity and risk:An international perspective on the justification of indeterminate preventive commitment

Particle-laden gravity flows, called turbidity currents, flow through river-like channels across the ocean floor. These submarine channels funnel sediment, nutrients, pollutants and organic carbon into ocean basins and can extend for over 1000’s of kilometers. Upon reaching the end of these channels, flows lose their confinement, decelerate, and deposit their sediment load; this is what we read in textbooks. However, sea floor observations have shown the opposite: turbidity currents tend to erode the seafloor upon losing confinement. Here we use a state-of-the-art scaling method to produce the first experimental turbidity currents that erode upon leaving a channel. The experiments reveal a novel flow mechanism, here called flow relaxation, that explains this erosion. Flow relaxation is rapid flow deformation resulting from the loss of confinement, which enhances basal shearing of the turbidity current and leads to scouring. This flow mechanism plays a key role in the propagation of submarine channel systems