The Sentence (The Outer Limits)

"The Sentence" is an episode of The Outer Limits television series. It first aired on 4 August 1996, and is the final episode of the second season.

Introduction

Dr. Jack Henson creates a Virtual Prison — an environment in which convicts experience a life sentence in a harsh regime in just a few hours of real time.

Opening narration

Plot

In a near future plagued by prison overcrowding, Dr. Henson presents his new invention — a virtual prison where a subject's feelings of guilt literally convict them by subjecting them to a lifetime of imprisonment in a matter of minutes. Demonstrating the device before a group of policymakers, Dr. Henson successfully demonstrates the process by rehabilitating a career criminal, though one of the observers, Senator Meade, voices concern about possible risks.

Determined to prove the viability of the process, Henson continues the demonstration with another prisoner, a man who repeatedly insists upon his innocence. When the new subject experiences seizures upon the device's activation, Dr. Henson realizes the man had indeed been telling the truth about his innocence. Since the machine was not programmed to deal with a man who was not guilty, it created a nightmarish world of a virtual prison that he could not escape. In an attempt to retrieve the subject, Henson hooks himself up into his machine; while he succeeds in retrieving the subject, the man dies soon afterwards.