Penal colony

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Epigraphy in honour of an Irish prisoner in the Australian penal colony of Botany Bay.

A penal colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general populace by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory. Although the term can be used to refer to a correctional facility located in a remote location it is more commonly used to refer to communities of prisoners overseen by wardens or governors having absolute authority.

Historically penal colonies have often been used for penal labour in an economically underdeveloped part of a state's (usually colonial) territories, and on a far larger scale than a prison farm. In practice such penal colonies may be little more than slave communities. The British, French, and other colonial empires heavily used North America and other parts of the world as penal colonies to varying degrees, sometimes under the guise of indentured servitude or similar arrangements.

British Empire[edit]

Penal colony in the Andaman Islands (c. 1895)

The British used colonial North America as a penal colony through a system of indentured servitude. Merchants would transport the convicts and auctioned them off to (for example) plantation owners upon arrival in the colonies. It is estimated that some 50,000 British convicts were sent to colonial America, representing perhaps one-quarter of all British emigrants during the 18th century. The State of Georgia for example was first founded by James Edward Oglethorpe by using penal prisoners taken largely from debtors' prison, creating a "Debtor's Colony". However, even though this largely failed, the idea that the state began as a penal has stayed both in popular history, and local lore.[1] The British also would often ship Irish and Scots to the Americas whenever rebellions took place in Ireland or Scotland, and they would be treated similar to the convicts, except that this also included women and children.

When that avenue closed in the 1780s after the American Revolution, Britain began using parts of what is now known as Australia as penal settlements. Australian penal colonies included Norfolk Island, Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), Queensland and New South Wales. Advocates of Irish Home Rule or of Trade Unionism (the Tolpuddle Martyrs) sometimes received sentences of deportation to these Australian colonies.[citation needed]. Without the allocation of the available convict labor to farmers, to pastoral squatters, and to Government projects such as roadbuilding, colonisation of Australia would not have been possible,[citation needed] especially considering the considerable drain on non-convict labor caused by several goldrushes that took place in the second half of the 19th century after the flow of convicts had dwindled and (in 1868) ceased.

Bermuda, off the North American continent, was also used during the Victorian period. Convicts housed in hulks were used to build the Royal Naval Dockyard there, and during the Second Boer War (1899-1902), Boer prisoners-of-war were sent to the archipelago and imprisoned on one of the smaller islands.

In colonial India, the British made various penal colonies. Two of the most infamous ones are on the Andaman Islands and Hijli. In the early days of settlement, Singapore was the recipient of Indian convicts, who were tasked with clearing the jungles for settlement and early public works.

Elsewhere[edit]

  • The Kingdom of Hawaii under the rule of King Kamehameha III replaced the death penalty with exile, and Kahoolawe became a men's penal colony sometime around 1830 while Kaena Point on Lanai served as the female penal colony. The law making the island a penal colony was repealed in 1853.
  • The Netherlands had a penal colony since the late 19th century. A town called Veenhuizen, originally set up by a private company to "re-educate" vagrants from the large cities in the west like Amsterdam, was taken over by the Department of Justice to be turned into a collection of prison buildings. The town is located in the least populated province of Drenthe in the north of the country, isolated in the middle of a vast area of peat and marshland.
  • Currently in Mexico, the island of Isla María Madre (in the Marías Islands) is used as a penal colony. With a small population (fewer than 1200), the colony is governed by a state official who is both the governor of the islands and chief judge. The military command is independent of the government and is exercised by an officer of the Mexican Navy. The other islands are uninhabited.
  • Tarrafal was a Portuguese penal colony in the Cape Verde Islands, set up by the head of the Portuguese government, Salazar, before WWII (1936) where anti-fascist opponents of this right-wing regime were sent. At least 32 Anarchists, Communists and other opponents of Salazar's regime died in that camp. The camp was closed in 1954 but was re-opened in the 1970s to jail African leaders fighting Portuguese colonialism.
  • Gorgona Island in Colombia housed a state high security prison from the 1950s. Convicts were dissuaded from escaping by the poisonous snakes in the interior of the island and the sharks patrolling the 30 km to the mainland. The penal colony was closed in 1984 and the last prisoners were transferred to the mainland. Most of the former jail buildings are now covered by dense vegetation, but some remain visible.
  • The Guantanamo Bay detention camp has been used by the United States as a penal colony to maintain and interrogate prisoners purportedly outside US legal jurisdiction.

Non-fiction[edit]

Main article: Devil's Island § Henri Charrière and Sylvain

Charrière's account aroused considerable controversy. French authorities disputed it and released penal colony records that contradicted his account. Charrière had never been imprisoned on Devil's Island. He had escaped from a mainland prison. French journalists or prison authorities disputed other elements of his book, and said that he had invented many incidents or appropriated experiences of other prisoners.[3] Critics said he should have admitted his book was fiction.[3]

In fiction[edit]

The concept of remote and inhospitable prison planets has been employed by science fiction writers. Some famous examples include:

Notes and references[edit]

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  1. ^ "British Convicts Shipped to American Colonies", American Historical Review 2 (Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History), October 1896 
  2. ^ Taylor, Alan. American Colonies. Penguin: London(2001).
  3. ^ a b Devil's Island#cite_note-Mail_.26_Guardian-8
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