"- I'm not sure I've correctly communicated the - when someone's been, say, defrauded, they will probably prefer harsher penalties for the perpetrator if those are available. But if they're voting on general policy, I believe that purples and greys are likely to prefer harsher sentences for any castes they can vote on, and blues, greens, and yellows are likely to want lighter sentences for themselves even if in so voting they grant the same to other castes. I'm not sure about oranges."

"So you don't think you can come up with any proposed sentencing law that will have majority approval within every caste?"

"Right. Disparate sentencing like we have now will poll fine with the higher status castes but poorly with the lower, making everything gentler would be similar, making everything harsher would be the reverse."

"If everything's equal you don't have to put it to a vote."

"Well, then I suppose I can disappoint some vengeful purples and greys."

"It helps that lots of crimes are remediable now."

"That's how we'll spin it."

"The rule for prison conditions is that they're allowed to transfer, is that going to be a concern?"

"To any others within the system?"

"Yes - couple places requested the swap infrastructure make it possible to separate co-conspirators and so on, we can accommodate that -"

"Does this mean we have to shut down the prisons that manage themselves by only allowing in certain applicants or is it only the other way around -?"

"No, no, that's fine, it's if they didn't let people leave that would be a problem."

"So we can still have one-caste prisons just fine - yeah I think we can get that through all right."

"One-caste prisons are just Amentans but there are lots of countries that offered something unique and as long as prisoners prefer it to something that meets our standards it wouldn't make sense to say it fails to meet them."

"What else is like that?"

"Various religions that offer a monastic retreat kind of thing, single-gender is of course a popular option, there's a place with chips like ours that has the victims record the experience of the crime that they had and send it so the criminal experiences it too, which sounds horrible to us but rather few of them transfer out, there's a cultural belief that once you've lived a mistake a hundredfold it's like it never touched you."

"Never touched you?"

Shrug. "Like - the victim will consider it as if you are a stranger and not the person who harmed them, employers won't consider it, God won't care for the ones who believe in that..."

"Huh."

"They do have really low recidivism - but I don't think it'd work for anyone else, runs off too much cultural stuff."

"Anyway, we can let people move to alien prisons if they like."

"Great! Is the death penalty thing going to be a concern aside from the extradition side -"

"The age limit? It's weird but in an orthogonal way to most of what we care about I think."

Nod. "It's very rare but technically legal for one polity to request a resurrection of somebody someone else executed."

"Do they then have to serve some lesser sentence?"