The Prison Generation

From The Coursebooks Wiki
Revision as of 20:54, 14 June 2020 by Siddharth1 (talk | contribs) (Sentences)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

The Prison Generation is the name given to the billions of people jailed after the Corporate Wars following the end of The Corporate Era.

Background

In a normal conflict, soldiers are given some immunity from their role in combat so long as they do not commit any war crimes. A soldier shooting another soldier in battle is war. The Corporate Wars, however, were fought between private corporations using effectively illegally-produced weapons. When a security guard for a private company shoots another security guard from another private company, it's murder. During the Corporate Wars, this happened on a massive scale.

Alongside it came shocking acts of brutality and crimes against humanity. The corporations involved did not adhere to the Rules of Organized Warfare, and the civilian population suffered catastrophically. No one involved was afforded the protections applied to soldiers in war, which meant everything they did counted as a civilian crime.

Sentences

Most of the security forces who played a direct role in the fighting received the death penalty. Of these a few were commuted, but very many were executed. Scientists and other employees of the megacorps, directly involved in the design and manufacture of weapons, were given life sentences. Those merely complicit in the crimes (such as low and medium executives) were given shorter, yet still stiff sentences. This accounted for over 30% of the population of corporate space, hundreds of billions of of people.

Though these were technically guilty under Alliance law, the Alliance had nothing even remotely approaching the resources needed to house that many new inmates. Even distributed among countless member worlds (where their ethical treatment could not be ensured) it would be an enormous hardship. The only organization able to take on such a mammoth task was the Gudersnipe Foundation, who already had an exceptionally sophisticated penal system in place, as well as contingencies for rapid expansion. Most of the prisoners were housed in penal colonies, many within former corporate space, and put to work on resource extraction.

The Prison Generation also became known as 'The Lost Generation'; Foundation prisons are segregated strictly by gender, and as such those serving life sentences were not afforded the opportunity to reproduce (many sentenced were as young as 20). Even those not serving life sentences had an average tenure of 20 years.

The Returned Troubles

This further created difficulty when those not serving life in prison were set to be released. The old corporate structure had been entirely dismantled. These people not only had no homes to go back to; they also had no money(as they had been paid in now-worthless corporate scrip). Many were old, and few had any worthwhile skills outside of the now non-existent corporate structure. To further addle things, the region they wished to return to had not yet recovered from the catastrophic corporate war. The harsh reality was quite simple: they had destroyed the world they once lived in, there was nowhere to go back to.

With the old world simply unable to accommodate them, a large number of older inmates elected to simply remain at the penal colonies even though their sentences had finished. It gave them the opportunity to be with their own people, and this was deemed preferable to being discharged on some alien world where they were known only for their crimes. Others, the younger, elected for a form of indentured servitude then being used by the Foundation to aid in reconstruction. This was the only real economical way to go back home; thought it meant a life of back-breaking labor. Still others found little choice but to go to work for he Gudersnipe Foundation, which they abhorred.