Britain's Penal System

Between 1700 and 1900 a system familiar to our eyes emerged as a result of important changes. The 1800s very harsh and a lot of crime was done in that time. The laws, punishment and jail were similar, also very different from today's. In the 1800s the punishment was much more survivor and stick to it more than now. If you lived back in that time, it was usual to walk the streets and you see a hanging happening. This showing the cruelty and none caring of the people and how harsh the punishment was.

Australia was first claimed by Captain Cook in early 1770, but it wasn’t settled until 1788 when the first fleet of 11 ships arrived at Botany Bay, carrying 1,530 passengers - mostly convicts, as well as some marines and officers. They moved to Port Jackson to begin establishing a settlement. Specific prisoners were chosen for the trip, the ones with skills in building, farming and other things that would have been useful to create a “liveable” environment for the new inhabitants. The first “free” settlers only arrived in 1793, thus beginning the colonisation of New South Wales.

Throughout the years, the use of imprisonment has varied, along with its influences of society. It is thought that although prisons have been around since the thirteenth century, prisons as we know them now to be have only been around for the last three centuries. The first uses of prisons were not seen as a form of punishment instead they were used as a way of making people do something. People would be held in prison until they paid their debts, or awaiting trial and then leading up to their sentence. McGowen (1995) suggests that from the early 1700s ‘bridewells’ a house of correction have existed, however at that time being used merely for vagrants and drunks. At the end of the sixteenth century there was a shift in punishment to imprisonment, along with this came a new, more humane idea of reform. Criminals would spend their days of prison carrying out hard labour. However after the American Revolution, imprisonment took a step back and there was another change. There was mass overcrowding within the prison service and although the death penalty was still being used it was a symbol of the power of the state. Therefore, an everyday way of dealing with offenders would be transportation to the colonies, being either Australia or America.

Those judged to be unmanageable or defiant might be sent to even more isolates places of secondary punishment. The most notorious of these were on Norfolk Island and at Port Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Brutal physical punishment, floggings and beatings were common and convicts were worked beyond the point of exhaustion. Port Arthur prison was established as a penal settlement in 1833. Here, psychological cruelty took precedence over physical brutality. Convicts spent long periods in isolation, without any physical contact with the outside world. Over the 80 years from 1788 until the last convicts arrived in 1868, approximately 160,000 convicts were transported to the Australian

Incarceration is thought of as a positive form of punishment, and negative form of punishment. The opinion varies with the type of person, and their experience from jail if they have gone. Most inmates while in prison will tell you it is a horrible place that should be gone. That would allow criminals to be free and that would let them cause harm to others or other illegal activities. Incarceration was not designed to be a paradise, it is a detention center for the bad, and meant for them to be punished. Without jails the world would be filled with even more evil, and would leave people in more danger than they already are.

Convicts had a hard life in Australia. The convicts in Australia really hated it, they just wanted to be home in England. A lot of the convicts even committed suicide and some people did illegal things on purpose to go to Australia to commit suicide, or they just simply left back home to England after there sentence was over, which was a huge end. Also a lot of convicts died from diseases because of the

The punishments for crime in the colonial times were harsh in some cases or humiliating. Some crimes like murder, treason, or piracy,(stealing from other boats) had people sentenced to death. Crimes that cost the price of humiliation were crimes such as being drunk or working or traveling on sunday.The specific way a criminal would be punished is that

When asked questions about things we have never experienced before it is hard to give a proper answer, all you can do is assume and imagine but you can never give an exact precise response. So when asked if Australia was a Fatal shore for everyone or if it was a land of opportunity, all you can do is assume and imagine based on the available information provided because you don’t really know the answer because you have not experienced it firsthand. From the information provided, Australia was more of a Fatal Shore than it was a land of opportunity. For both convicts and free settlers life in Australia was extremely harsh. The lifestyle of Australia was extremely different to the environment that they were used to back home in England and it would have been hard for them to adapt to. However life in Australia wasn’t all that bad, for most of the convicts it was a second chance at life and for the free settlers it was a great opportunity to make their fortune.

Question: Discuss the history of the prison system in the United States. Be sure to identify the various stages that the American prison system has gone through. Also identify what problems were present with each stage as you see them.

Convict discipline was harsh. For those convicts who committed further offences in the colony, punishments were brutal. There was the cat o'nine tails: fifty lashes was a common punishment. Equally feared was time on the chain gangs where, shackled in ankle irons or chains (weighing ten pounds or more), convicts were employed in the back-breaking work

The convict discourse, Australia’s first image, was christened by the first fleet, which consisted of incredibly hard-hitting men, who came from Britain in 1788. Britain was no longer allowed to ship convicts from Britain to the American Colonies, forcing her

The sporadic and numerous deaths of Aboriginal Australians whilst in custody, has been an issue of social and moral concern for both the Australian legal system and Australian communities. This predicament has been faced by the Australian legal system for decades until its summit in the late 1980s, were the death of an Aboriginal whilst incarceration was being reported every 11 days. The legal system had to instantaneously make a move that would remedy this issue before the situation got out of hand. Per contra, if it were not for both the legal, non-legal actions and responses, then this issue of Aboriginal Australians constantly dying whilst incarcerated would not have been brought to the attention of the wider Australian communities, nor

Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1842, were he witnessed solitary confinement in Eastern State Penitentiary just outside Philadelphia. Dickens viewpoints on the prison system in America is that he “persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those who benevolent gentlemen who carry execution, do no know what it is that they are doing”. The lets the audience know what Dickens believes to be the negative part of the Prison Discipline. Dickens states that not many men are capable of enduring long period of agony and torture. The prison system to Dickens led him to be convinced that “There is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has the right to inflict upon his fellow creatures”. This lets us conclude that Dickens’s assessment toward the Prisons has a more negative aspect. To support his claims of why the prisons have a negative aspect is seen through the numerous prisoners, he visited during his tour of the American prisons. He included an individual who was about to be released after two years in solitary confinement. Dickens reaction toward the man was that he felt his “Heart bled for him; and when the tears rolled down his checks…to ask, with his trembling hands nervously clutching…whether there was hope of his dismal sentence being commuted, the spectacle was really too painful to witness”. Dickens states that “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries

In 1788, the first group of English convicts was shipped from England to Botany Bay in Australia. Convicts were removed from England and other countries because the higher class believed that people like them should not coincide with society because they were tainted. Generally, convicts were ship to America, however, the Revolutionary War was occurring, so England needed to find a new place for the convicts. As a result, Captain Arthur Phillip, shown below, was in charge of transporting the convicts and colonizing Australia (History). The map showed the route Captain Phillip had to take to reach Australia. According to Fellowships of First Fleeters, the voyage took a total of thirty-six weeks to reach Australia. Next, the table showed the

The two countries I chose to compare similarities between is England and France because I find these two two countries to have interesting sentencing philosophies. After reading the text for this week for both countries, similarities I discovered between the two include the history of corrections, architectural reforms and organizational structure.