Service of Public Utility

Service of Public Utility or SPU is the harshest type of sentence given out by Terran courts. It includes the withdrawal of citizenship which effectively means the loss of all legal rights and protections for the duration of the sentence. It is given out to individuals deemed by the court to be "without hope for effective reintegration into society", which includes traitors, serial killers and rapists, pedophiles, kidnappers and pirates. It should not be confused with Public Service, which is on the contrary one of the lightest sentences given out for minor offences. 
The sentence itself is a form of forced labour, most often purged on "forced labour worlds" (FLW). These are selected for their isolation and the poorly adapted climate to human life. Convicts are forced to do menial activities, most often of industrial nature or involving the extraction of minerals. The rate of guards to prisoners is very high compared to prison-stations. Whereas prisons have a single guard for a hundred prisoners, FLWs have one guard for every third convict. This makes the likelihood of escape effectively zero. SPU sentences can however never be longer than five years. They can however be followed by up to an additional decade in high-security prisons. Only about a third of SPU convicts survive their sentence, with a majority dying from exhaustion or guard abuse.