If that sort of arrangement existed today, I think you'd see many people lining up for Space Supermax.
How interesting would it be if laws on Earth changed during your stay. If your prison sentence got reduced on Earth you might only be in there for a few minutes. Interesting stuff to think about for sure.
"Modern society can neither use you as-is nor reform you into a productive member. We hope, in the fullness of time, the future society which ours has developed into will find you a more tractable case."
It would certainly dissuade people from re-offending with the same skills, at least in a technical and, possibly, social context.
Also, this seems like a great place to ask any physicists that may be reading: Is there consensus about whether you could live inside a supermassive black hole? Theoretically, you should be able to cross the event horizon and be quite comfortable (apart from the existential horror of never being able to leave, running out of fuel, and ultimately succumbing to spaghettification). However, some models predict that you'd be instantly ripped apart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_%28physics%29
Which scenario do you personally believe?
EDIT: I confused parsec and AU, because I'm dumb. That's like confusing a bread crumb with a skyscraper. But I wonder whether it's possible to live in a blackhole for a little while?
In other words, a parsec is way larger than an AU. To give a sense of scale, a parsec is 3.26 light-year and Proxima Centauri is 1.3 parsec away.
For even more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec
I'm still crossing my fingers that someone knows whether it might be possible to live inside a blackhole. At least for a time.
In order to answer the first question about living inside a blackhole, one could imagine dangling one's legs into an event horizon and then pulling them back out. If you can do that, then there's no firewall, and it's possible to live inside a black hole. This is obviously impossible, since nothing can come back out of an event horizon by definition.
But now imagine slingshotting around a blackhole while dangling your legs toward it. Since nothing can escape an event horizon, your legs (or whatever you're dangling) would be ripped away as soon as they cross the event horizon, right? However, imagine getting very close to the horizon, but not actually crossing it.
So, the question is: How fast would you need to be slingshotting around a blackhole in order to dangle something near the event horizon while still being able to retrieve it? Do you need to be going exponentially closer to the speed of light, with respect to how close you want to approach the horizon?
Imagine a spacecraft with an extremely long pole sticking out of it. The spacecraft slingshots around the blackhole while dangling the pole towards it. What would happen if the tip of the pole crosses the horizon? Would it cause the whole spacecraft to get pulled in, or would the pole break away?
This is probably a basic physics question, but sadly I'm not a basic physicist, as I've shown with my original confusion.
It's quite interesting to realize no one will ever know whether it's possible to live inside a blackhole without jumping fully into one, at which point you'll never be able to tell anyone else.
There is no speed in which you could approach the event horizon, go inside, and the come out again. It is, by its very definition a one way ticket.
For objects with mass, this distance increases.
If I recall, there is a book about this. Samuel Delany, Empire Star. Absolutely phenomenal. From an amazon review: "The best way to describe the book is to say that it is the literary equivalent of an M.C. Escher print."
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Star-Samuel-R-Delany/dp/0553234...
Oh my god YES! This!