We are speaking with Jenni Parsons, the new Director of the Nevada Sleeper prison.

You are in charge of a new type of prison system. Can you explain what it is?

It is a federally controlled prison that will eventually house most or all of the most dangerous criminals in the United States.

What makes this prison different from existing prisons?

All the prisoners serve their time in medically induced comas. We refer to these inmates as sleepers.

What is the advantage of doing it this way?

There are three main problems with the old system. First, criminal leaders can still run their operations from inside the prisons. Second, the old style prisons have always been training grounds where the novice criminals learned from the more experienced criminals. And lastly, the costs of housing criminals in the traditional system has always been quite high.

The sleeper style prison is designed to address those three issues.

Your inmates are not just from the federal system are they?

Yes, that’s right. The federal government has agreements with fifty three of the nation’s sixty one states. This allows any new inmates with felony convictions to be transferred to federal custody. Since it is much cheaper for the states to house their felon population in the federal sleeper prison, most states have been glad to cooperate.

Why just new prisoners? What about existing felony prisoners?

There are constitutional issues involved in applying a new penalty to already convicted prisoners that did not exist at the time of the conviction or even at the time of the crime. Rather than spend decades in the court wrangling about these issues, we opted to apply the penalty only to new convictions.

All the cooperating state governments now have laws on their books that assess the penalty for felonies as sleeper time in the federal system.

What is the capacity of your prison?

We can accommodate up to five million sleepers. We currently have a little more than one million prisoners, with an additional net increase of about two hundred thousand new sleepers expected each year.

Critics of the program are split into two groups. On group says that turning people into sleepers is cruel and unusual punishment. The other group says that this isn’t really a punishment at all. That it is just the equivalent of giving the inmates a “long nap”. What do you say about that?

First, there is no medical evidence available that suggests that sleepers feel pain, can think or dream. Their brains are operating at levels necessary to maintain basic life support only (breathing, heart action, etc.). So if it’s a “cruel” punishment, it’s cruel in a way that the sleepers can’t sense.

The new paradigm that is the basis of the sleeper system is Crime Prevention rather than Crime Punishment. By giving convicted felons long bouts of sleeper time, it gets them away from the law abiding citizens. And since they can’t train fledgling criminals, it is hoped that over a long period of time the quality of criminals on the outside would begin to decline.

In an ideal world, most of the experienced criminals would be doing sleep time and the only people committing most of the crimes would the less experienced criminals (who incidentally would be easier to catch). We are still a long from this ideal situation.

Lastly, does becoming a sleeper involve a penalty? Yes.

Medical research has shown that sleepers age at least fifty percent faster than conscious people due to the lack of physical activity. So a sleeper who is resuscitated after a twenty year sleep would be chronologically twenty years older but would also be physically at least thirty years older.

People who have gone through long sleeps have arm and leg muscles that have atrophied. Generally it takes several months (or sometimes several years) of intense physical therapy to restore a semblance of normal function to the muscles. So big and tough criminals who enter the sleeper system are not so big and tough when they get out.

Can you describe a little of the actual prison and what goes on there?

There are actually two buildings located in the Nevada desert. One is the actual sleeper prison. This is a building that has three hundred floors and houses approximately seventeen thousand sleepers per floor. Ultimately, it can house up to five million sleepers.

The other building is the temporary prison. It is more like a regular maximum security prison. This houses the inmates that either about to become sleepers or have been resuscitated from their sleep times and are now undergoing physical therapy before release to the outside world.

All sleepers have id chips embedded into their forearms that tell the security system who and where they are. If the sleepers are moved more than a half of a meter from their assigned location, the security computer is notified and guards are sent to investigate. Also, each bed has twenty four hour video surveillance to protect the sleepers from negligent or malicious actions by doctors or med techs.

Speaking of malicious actions. One of the med techs was recently convicted of killing a sleeper. What happened and what was the resolution?

It turned out that the tech had some long simmering feud with one of the sleepers that began when they were both on the outside. As a result, the tech added a little something to the iv drip to hasten the demise of the sleeper.

Our standard procedure in all deaths or serious trauma of sleepers is to review the video log. In cases of deaths, a mandatory autopsy by an outside independent doctor is also required. The logs and the autopsy report confirmed that the sleeper had been poisoned.

The tech is now a sleeper and will be here until his death.

As a result of this incident, our background checks of anyone who has access to the sleepers have intensified. Anyone who was ever a victim of a crime, has had friends or relatives who were victims of crimes or has any known criminal associates is no longer allowed access. Further, we do credit reports and analysis of each employees financial assets on a monthly basis to make sure no one is receiving bribes to do things they shouldn’t be doing.

Are male and female sleepers segregated?

Since the sleepers can’t do anything to each other, we didn’t think there was much point. We have male and female med techs. Generally, if it’s convenient, we have the male med tech process the male sleepers and female techs handle the females. Sometimes it’s not convenient and we just do what we need to do to get the job done.

I understand that your facility is considered very high security.

[laughing] Yes that is an understatement. There are obviously things I can’t talk to you about but I can say that when the sleeper building was designed , it was assumed that sleepers would not be able to escape on their own power. So for an escape to happen, either it would have to be with insider help or by an external assault on the compound.

The embedded chips and perpetual video surveillance are a deterrent to insiders helping in an escape.

The sleeper building itself has no windows. The only pipes coming into the building are multiple water pipes. Each pipe has a diameter big enough to just allow a skinny rat to get through. No human being could possibly use that to enter the building. Sewage is processed onsite so there are no sewage pipes leaving the building. The roof top has access ports for heating and cooling. These are patrolled by armed Air Force guards on a twenty four hour basis.

There is just one exterior door. It is normally closed and can only be opened from the inside. When it is opened, both supply trucks and pedestrians can enter. The door is only opened when the door guard gets a confirmation from the guard the outside check point that the people attempting entry into the building are authorized.

The door is made of thick battle tank armor. It can take sustained shots from regular weapons without failing.

The Air Force has the responsibility for the security of the perimeter of the buildings. There is a small base nearby with jets and attack helicopters for use in the defense of the complex.

There is an exclusion zone of one hundred kilometers in each direction from the buildings. The airspace is a No Fly Zone. There is a fence around the perimeter with ground sensors to detect intruders. Finally, there is a clearly marked secondary buffer zone that is bobby trapped with land mines.

By presidential order, this area has been designated as a Lethal Force Is Authorized zone.

With all that firepower, have you had many security problems?

When the zone was first built, there were several breaches of the outer fences, mostly by people who were curious as to what was going on. But of those who breached, none of them was brave enough to attempt to enter the mine field. Ultimately, we captured every intruder and they are all doing major sleep time in the complex.

The most serious security breach happened last year. A suicide bomber with a truck load of explosives crashed through the checkpoint gate. His apparent intent was to get to the sleeper prison and blow up as many sleepers as possible. But since the distance from the checkpoint to the building is one hundred kilometers, the Air Force had enough time to launch multiple helicopters. The helicopters fired missiles at the truck and it exploded while it was still a long way away from the prison. There was a lot of damage to the road but none to the buildings.

Additional classified enhancements to the security system have been added to prevent a repeat of that type of incident.

With all that security, do you still say that it is cheaper to use a sleeper prison than the traditional prisons? What about when you factor in the costs of the military level security?

While building the sleeper prison and the surrounding security system was expensive, it was still much less expensive on a per prisoner basis than building the equivalent amount of regular prisons. There are no escape proof cells to build, no facilities to keep the inmates busy, etc., etc.

The greatest personnel expense is the doctors and the med techs. We currently have about thirty thousand of them for each shift and that number will increase as the population grows. But even that army of people is smaller than the number of guards needed to guard this many prisoners. Plus it is far cheaper to employ a med tech to take care of sleeper than it is to find a qualified armed guard to do the same job.

And the military is not using that much resources in defending the complex. On any given shift, less than one hundred troops are involved in our security. So unless there is an alert, most people at the base are busy doing other things.