Permanent villain depowerment?

Whenever I talk about power-suppression drugs, the same question always gets asked: "can the authorities take powers away from villains?"

So far, no. And when it happens, you'll know, because it'll be the biggest news since the discovery of superpowers to begin with. It'll mean calls for legislation to forcibly depower all villains, even those in jail. There'll be pogroms in other countries, riots, news articles, pundits. Everyone will want to control the "problem" (supers), with depowerment the punishment for noncompliance.

Until then, as far as I know, only the heroine Illumina is capable of permanently depowering someone, and even then there are some villains she can't (or maybe won't) depower. Rest assured that the authorities are furiously trying to learn her secret, though. So far, from what I know, she isn't cooperating.

Depowering drugs might be a thing in 20 years or 200. All we know now, thanks to Illumina, is that it's possible. But even then, it's not like Eve-active women will stop giving birth to new supers. Powers - and heroes, and villains - are here to stay.

The legalities of permanent power loss

Furman v. Georgia laid out a four-part test in 1972 for what constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment": whether the punishment degrades human dignity; whether it is inflicted in arbitrary fashion; whether it is rejected by society; and whether it is patently unnecessary.

One depowered villain (the first Blacklight) actually tried to sue the government for sanctioning Illumina's power drain on him. The case was thrown out for technical reasons, but the government's defense was very interesting, and troubling. First, they claimed that since supers were essentially extra-human, the loss of these extra powers did not impinge on basic human dignity. Second, they argued that the punishment wasn't arbitrary, because it followed the conventional pattern of escalation of force that police use every day. Third, they said it wasn't rejected by society because of its novelty (the judge was not amused by this line of reasoning). Fourth, they argued that Blacklight's actions had placed people in jeopardy, and that as a repeat offender it was not "patently unnecessary".

Blacklight's prosecution argued from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN in 1948, that depowerment violated the "security of person" the Declaration called for. Whether the government was correct that supers are human plus something else, they said, wasn't relevant. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man still deserves his one eye.

Aside from this argument, they also tried to refute the government's position about societal rejection by drawing analogies to lobotomies and chemical castration, two techniques that have been used recently to deal with prisoners (criminal or otherwise). They went back further and compared loss of power to amputation.

Overall the government had a good case, though I am certain Blacklight's legal team would have better chances with a more sympathetic (or less biased) judge. That said, I expect that any permanent power loss mechanism will be employed by the government long before the legality of doing so is settled at the national level - it's too powerful a weapon not to use.

Villain punishment in other countries

I collected stories from a few international villains. After hearing most of them, I concluded two things. First, that I didn't want to talk about law enforcement in other countries, because I clearly don't have enough information to give sound advice. Second, American villains are lucky sons of bitches.

Let's run down a few of the alternatives.

Oubliette

In eastern Europe, a group of powerful heroes found a way around the Hashmal process. Rather than trying to hurt their villains to death and risk empowering them further, they pitched them into abandoned salt mines and sealed them away under thousands of tons of material. This didn't directly injure the villains - physically - but those guys are essentially trapped in living tombs miles under the earth. That's just mean, man.

Forced labor

Some villains (and for that matter, some heroes and unaligned civilian supers) are put to work as living engines or tools - those with heat or electrical powers are chained into devices which can harness their output, for example. There's a few heroes who have chosen to walk away from Omelas and criticize this practice, but for the most part, nobody cares - villains are villains, right?

Depowerment and execution

Power-suppression drugs aren't just used in America, or for making it safe to jail a super. In some places, they're used as a prelude to execution of villains. The worst part is that the bodies of the condemned are then handed over to scientists and researchers for experimentation.

Villain parole and rehabilitation

Though it's not a topic I hope most readers of this guide will need to know, I want to talk about villain parole & rehabilitation. There was an earlier topic on breaking into the movie industry, and several people asked me to expand on this topic.

In general, villains don't get offered parole unless there's somebody external pulling strings or advocating for their release. Usually this comes with a set of conditions (gainful employment, on-the-job monitoring, ACTION poking its nose into your business) that makes getting out an onerous burden. Extraordinary acts of good behavior - and I mean more than just "not breaking out with the rest of the guys", I mean things like actively putting down a prison break or riot - can sometimes lead the way to a reduced sentence for newbie villains. For us old-timers, nothing short of flashing serious money at the judge and/or the DA will get the wheels of justice sufficiently greasy.

The old trick of a villain lawyering up and walking that you'd see on shows like S.W.A.T. and Supercop in the 1970s don't work any more. From the late 70's to the 90's, the American justice system had a concept called the "rolling conviction", which was meant to fix the problem of supervillains breaking out of jail with ease. The villain Floodwater's legal team came up with a great workaround which effectively killed the usefulness of the rolling conviction, which neatly coincided with the rise of newer villain incarceration technology from companies like TRS and Johnson & Johnson. Plus, there's decades of precedent that have redefined fundamental terms like "assault" and "deadly force" when a superhuman is involved.

Law firms will work for anyone. However, because any or all of your legal holdings will probably long since have a lien on them (to pay for the damage you did), you usually won't have a legal source of funds to retain a good firm, and a bad firm won't be able to spring you. You'll need to have laundered your money into some legitimate holding arrangement not tied to you, or have a wealthy patron (like a movie studio). A rare few villains, like the Scarab Guardian, effectively had this done for them by the government.

Your conviction as a villain - along with everything that went with it, like blood draws, DNA evidence, power weaknesses, testimony, and so on - will always stay on the books. Once a villain, always a villain, as far as the justice system is concerned.

Q&A: Why isn't there a single prison for supervillains?

After talking about incarceration, I was asked:

Why doesn't America just build a single super-villain prison and lock them all up there? Wouldn't it be better to consolidate all the anti-power technology, stronger cells, and trained guards in a single place?

There's several reasons why this isn't happening. Here they are, in no particular order.

Economic interest. Even Federal penitentiaries are located in one state or another. Congressional representatives get campaign contributions from the companies who make power-suppression drugs, from people who build prisons, and both private and public security companies who staff them. In general, the Congressmen want to keep the campaign contributions coming, but more importantly want to send pork to their state. So nobody wants to pick a single site, because there's got 50 smaller ones pouring slop into the trough. Thus, the necessary legislation won't be able to pass.

NIMBY. Short for "not in my back yard". This is the local legislature's answer to "hey can we put hundreds of dangerous demigods in your most populated city?" Seriously, there's been Congressional push-back against building wind farms in their states, because they're afraid of spoiling their view. Nobody wants a consolidated prison in their state for safety reasons, and they aren't making enough campaign contributions at the local level to sway anyone's opinion here.

Accidents and sabotage. That said, there is a legitimate argument about safety. For example, say that you're distributing 22 types of power suppressant to 100 inmates. One screw-up, one swapped bottle, one "accidentally" damaged dispenser or placebo introduced by a ringer, and a pissed-off and re-powered villain is going to rip your prison a new one.

Prison breaks. If someone put 100 villains together under a single roof, I promise the rest of us would blow the shit out of the walls and get those guys out - even if we didn't like them personally. Every active villain out there means less law enforcement resources to dedicate to you. If you do it right, those villains won't be competing with you or interfering with your capers. So overall, a stable and sizable population of free villains is compelling enough for the rest of us to take steps like this.

Thanks for the questions, and keep them coming!

Villain incarceration and transportation

These days, the technology behind keeping supers imprisoned is pretty good. It wasn't always like that. In fact, "villains can escape from jail a week after capture" is such a persistent meme thanks to decades of poor understanding of super-biology and lack of experience.

Chemical restraints

The current state of the art in super incarceration is chemical restraint. These are drugs, either "generic" or tailored to an individual (or set of powers), that inhibit the use of one or more super-powers. Part of the goal of the Transhuman Capability Catalog was to track the specific mechanisms behind powers. Based on this information, companies like Persona and Pfizer are able to synthesize suppression drugs.

The use of these drugs has been evaluated for constitutionality in many of the circuit courts within the United States. No legal challenge has reached the Supreme Court as of yet, and it's doubtful that they would hear one - there's too much at stake to meddle with something that's working.

The actual administration of these drugs depends on the super. Some are ingested with food, others are injected, and others are delivered as an aerosol in the prisoner's cell. The drugs can take effect anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours after delivery, and could be effective for hours or days. The first and second generation of power suppressors are now off the market since it was proven that almost all supers would develop a tolerance and eventual immunity to their effects.

Occasionally a prison will experiment with attaching collars containing suppression drugs to their super-inmates. The goal is to create a system that maintained the suppression while also allowing the inmate to roam around the complex with less supervision.

Physical restraints

Supers who are unable to break out of a jail cell, one way or another, are pretty rare. That said, some do exist. Most prisons would prefer their existing cells to an expensive drug deal with Big Pharma, so there's a fair amount of competition for "easy" villains.

Prisoner transfers

When a villain needs to be moved - to another facility, or to stand trial, or something similar - it's a big deal. The cops keep the transfer route a secret, even from other departments, until almost the day of the transfer.

Here are a few ways that villain transfers have been detected and interfered with:

• Prison financial records indicated a cancellation of the power suppression drug order, along with a requisition for vehicles.
• Suppression drugs were replaced with a placebo by an insider.
• A prison placed orders for a tailored suppression drug despite not having the prisoner for which they were tailored.
• Guards or other police officers took a bribe to reveal the details of the route.

ACTION is pretty good about providing security for this work these days, so most prison-break scenarios for villains require a fair amount of inside information. Acquiring insider assets, keeping them paid, and getting actual useful information from them are all big challenges for villains who want to take care of their fellows. But if you do break another villain out of the slam, you can and should expect plenty of gratitude. The value of this cannot be overstated.