How Effective was the Forced Transportation of Criminals to Australia as a Legal Punishment?

They go of an island to take special charge,

Much warmer than Britain, and ten times as large;

No Custom-house duty, no freightage to pay,

And tax-free they’ll live when at Botany Bay.

– The New London Magazine 1787

On January 26, 1788, in a dubious yet revolutionary penal experiment, the First Fleet arrived in what would later be called Sydney Harbour, marking the beginning of Australia’s history as a penal colony. For the convicts, most of whom had never travelled more than 10 miles from their place of birth, it must have been like stepping out into a surreal, unimagined world. The site itself had only been visited once before during Captain Cook’s first voyage which formed the basis of practically all knowledge Britain had of Australia. Besides this, Australia, or ‘Terra Australis’ as it had been known, was shrouded in classical myths of a wondrous antipodean continent. Thus began Britain’s use of transportation to Australia as a form of criminal punishment, which would eventually see the forced emigration of over 160,000 lives to one of the most sparse and least-known corners of the Earth.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, soaring rates of crime had been flooding Britain’s gaols with prisoners, causing a crisis as they became evermore unmanageable. In the midst of this chaos, parliament adopted a series of experimental penal policies to deal with the uncontrollable flux of prisoners, among which included transportation. By today’s standards, Georgian punishment was grotesquely unjust, barbarous, and flawed, yet some of their ‘solutions’ to crime at the very embryonic stages of criminology are fascinating. Transportation was ultimately abolished in 1868 for a variety of reasons, largely due to resistance in the colonies. However, viewed as part of a larger justice system, it is incredibly interesting to evaluate how effective transportation was for its day and whether it outmatched the predecessors of the punishments we use in the modern age.

What Other Forms of Punishment Existed in Britain at the Time of Transportation?

Transportation was not new. Before exiling convicts to a practically unknown antipodean continent, many prisoners had been sent as indentured servants to the Thirteen American Colonies. However, the American War of Independence had cut out America as a dumping ground for convicts, further overcrowding Britain’s gaols which were already notoriously squalid.

In the eighteenth century, being taken to a gaol meant being put in a disease-infested, privately-run prison with fees for food, accommodation, and even the removal of leg irons in some cases. Gaolers were rarely paid salaries and instead derived their income from exhorting prisoners. Thomas Bambridge, for example, a gaoler at Fleet Prison, extorted money out of prisoners by threatening to put them in manacles. At Marshalsea prison, charity provisions for the prisoners were pocketed by gaolers, and prisoners were often forced to defecate “within the room, the stench of which is noisome beyond expression.” Moreover, in this environment, young children often had to stay with their convicted parents and, with a lack of classification based on the crime committed, would be mixed in with serious offenders. A lack of classification between criminals also meant that Georgian gaols were a hotbed for encouraging crime. A debtor, for instance, would live alongside thieves who could teach them another solution to poverty.

By 1776, parliament was being increasingly forced to consider alternatives to the gaols which were becoming increasingly unviable. A provisional measure was put in place in which convicts would work Britain’s docks, living in decommissioned ships called hulks. However, these soon became overcrowded themselves and were breeding grounds for typhus and a plethora of other diseases. Although eventually becoming a long-lasting feature of criminal punishment, the hulks were adopted out of desperation and never considered an effective punishment: they were expensive at times of seasonal unemployment in the dockyards, extremely unhealthy, and were another hotbed for encouraging recidivism.

Another alternative was the ‘model prison,’ the penitentiary. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there were many ideas over what the ideal prison should be. Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, advocated the Panopticon, a circular prison designed in such a way that the inspectors could see each isolated prisoner and speak to them individually through ‘conversation tubes’ whilst remaining unseen. Whilst never being adopted as the model for Britain’s modern prisons, the Panopticon’s focus on solitary confinement and isolation became lasting features of nineteenth century penitentiaries. At Pentonville Prison, prisoners were even forced to wear masks around each other: an extreme degree of isolation which led to dire states of mental health. Prisoners were also expected to be given rigorous religious instruction and to perform hard labour. Most of this, such as working the treadmill, was pointlessly cruel and barely did anything to keep the staggering costs down. Although these were an undoubtable improvement from the older Georgian gaols, they could hardly be considered reforming. Britain’s first penitentiary, Millbank Prison, was described by Charles Dickens in David Copperfield as being in a state of dilapidation and ruin, littered with “carcasses of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away.” This gives us an idea of the state of squalor and neglect which even Britain’s ‘model’ prisons were in. However, perhaps the biggest disadvantage of the penitentiary, especially to the eyes of parliament, were its costs. Whilst parliament had passed acts encouraging the building of penitentiaries as far back as 1779, little effort was made to construct them until around the end of transportation in 1868, due to the finances involved. As a result, although arguably one of the better features of Britain’s penal system, penitentiaries were not a significant feature of Britain’s criminal justice system at the time of transportation and therefore did little to deal with the swarms of prisoners.

Georgian Britain’s most notorious form of punishment, however, was the public execution. Although ironically intended to teach an example, executions would descend into public spectacles in which thousands would turn out, accompanied by vendors, to watch the hangings. Far from discouraging crime, the hangings could give many criminals celebrity status, such as the famous prison escapee, Jack Sheppard. To add to this perverse environment, it was not unusual to see the convict’s family fight to carry off the dead body, preventing it from being donated to anatomists at the end of the hanging.

Although they were seen as a barbaric practice even at the time, public executions were Britain’s strongest deterrent and, as they were phased out in the early-to-mid 1800s, desperately needed a replacement. In these circumstances, the brutalities of transportation to Australia were seen as a reforming alternative.

What was Transportation and How Did it Operate as a Form of Punishment?

Over its course of around 80 years, transportation took on many forms. However, it commonly featured several stages. This included a preliminary stage in which the convicts would be held in the disease-ridden hulks before being transported, which took around 3-6 months. Upon arrival, convicts would be either set to work on public work projects or sent to colonists as ‘assigned labourers’: effectively slaves. If convicts behaved well, or the governor simply wanted to reduce upkeep costs, they would be given a ticket-of-leave which would give them greater freedoms and enable them to find work. Convicts would then be given a form of pardon at the end of their sentence and would integrate into the colony as ordinary subjects.

The majority of the convicts were thieves, some even transported for the exceptionally petty offense of stealing handkerchiefs. However, as the justice system gradually reformed throughout the nineteenth century, transportation would come to replace the death penalty as Britain’s most severe punishment and would see more serious crimes added to this list.

Was Transportation Successful?

Reformation

By no means was being transported to Australia and being forced to work as a temporary slave reformatory. The voyage itself was a hotspot for re-offense, with prostitution between convict women and sailors becoming commonplace. Upon arrival, many convicts quickly fell into alcoholism, a reflection of life in New South Wales, which saw convicts consuming on average over six times the amount of alcohol consumed in England per person. This was ironically encouraged by the New South Wales Corps which held a monopoly on selling rum, one of the most lucrative goods in the new colony. The Corps itself contained large numbers of ex-convicts who, although being given work, were notoriously corrupt, clearly showing how transportation had done little to better them. Hardly any concern had been devoted to creating schools as the colony progressed and clergymen were rarely interested in leaving behind their lives to preach to convicts on a barren wasteland, so there was little encouragement for convicts to morally reform. On top of this, the sites chosen for colonisation were difficult to cultivate, so many ex-convicts were forced to resume a life of theft after their attempts at farming failed.

However, having a new start in a colony with, at times, greater employment prospects than Britain offered many convicts the opportunity to start a new life once their sentences had expired. In a study comparing recidivism rates in Britain and Western Australia towards the end of transportation, Australia appears to be significantly more reformatory, even if rates were appalling for both regions by modern standards. By contrast, around 80% of convicts were re-convicted in Britain from around 1856 to 1887. Rather than being the design of the system itself, which only really aimed to dump convicts as far away from Britain as possible, this was likely due to the opportunities transportation presented. Nonetheless, it was an improvement from Britain where, upon release, ex-convicts would return to the same conditions which had originally encouraged their offences.

Deterrence

As the satirical poem at the beginning of this article suggests, transporting convicts free of charge to a continent with oftentimes greater opportunities than Britain had its problems. How would it deter people from committing crimes?

Initially, it is without a doubt that transportation was sufficiently harsh. The fact that the first years of the colony are often dubbed the ‘starvation years’ by historians says enough. Additionally, it cannot be overlooked that transportation meant a complete end to whatever life the convict had before being sentenced. After all, only around 5% of convicts returned to Britain. The rest were left to desperately clutch onto memories of friends and family who they would never see again.

However, as the years passed and the colony grew, administrators in Britain demanded that the punishment be made more severe to discourage crime. This was felt to be necessary at a time when prisons were being made harsher (with practices such as the treadmill) so that they would not seem attractive to the poor. In Australia, this led to waves of new features such as arbitrary labour and sites of harsher secondary punishment for re-offenders. The most notorious of these was Norfolk Island where the early sadistic administrator, Joseph Forveaux, conjured up draconian punishments. Among these were the 200-lash whipping called the ‘feeler’ and the practice of keeping convicts in a water pit for 48 hours at a time where they could not sleep for fear of drowning. In fact, these punishments were so mind-numbingly painful that some convicts intentionally re-offended to be taken to Sydney to be re-trialled. As the governor of Tasmania said, the convicts “were greater objects of compassion than of vengeance.”

The problem was not a lack of deterrence but rather the inconsistencies of punishment. The other side of the coin to Forveaux’s brutalities was the recurrent issue of free colonists being too generous towards the convicts who were assigned to them as labourers. In Dicken’s Great Expectations we see a transported convict come back to Britain extremely prosperous. Whilst this case is highly exaggerated, it is true that, by 1815, conditions in Australia were generally considered better than those of Britain. In effect, it was utterly unpredictable what the fate of a convict would be once they had been sentenced. Would they die from extreme neglect and disease during the voyage? Would they starve to death after arriving? Or would they become extremely wealthy once their sentence had expired?

Overall Judgement

Transportation was never a good penal policy: it was an inconsistent deterrent and hardly reformed the convicts. However, in an age where punishments were picked between public executions, squalid, overcrowded gaols, and disease-ridden hulks, transportation was a vital alternative. It provided a deterrent to replace the barbaric public execution and proved far more reformatory than any other punishment in Britain until improved penitentiaries were later built. This said, we should take into account that contemporaries did not evaluate transportation in the same way as us. For most of its lifespan, transportation was never meant to reform. Rather, members of parliament looked to Australia as a cheap dumping ground for the convicts Britain had rejected. At a time when social explanations of crime were overlooked in favour of a belief in a ‘criminal class,’ the real function of transportation was simply to get rid of Britain’s criminals. In this sense, contorted and heartless under a modern gaze, the transportation of convicts to Australia served its brutal purpose of wrestling away convicts from their previous lives for the ‘public good.’

Written by Benjamin Fradley

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