h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY 2
It was recently reported that a university-based study is underway to compare the rate of re-offending among those sentenced to Transportation compared to the alternative punishments available.
Well the alternative to transportation was execution: and the re-offending rate of the dead is statistically negligible. This point was made in an interview that I heard on French radio some years ago when the descendent of a King in French-speaking Africa was asked whether he was ashamed that his ancestor had sold slaves to the Europeans and replied that he was actually proud that he had been a humanitarian who seized on the opportunity to spare the lives of people who otherwise would have been executed.
In Africa as in England, and most places, keeping people locked up at public expense was not seen as a viable form of punishment, and prisons were largely just for holding people until they had been judged. Then (a) those who were found innocent were expected to pay their own gaol fees for the board and lodging they had received at the Crown expense. And (b)those who were found guilty were given some form of corporal or capital punishment with a popular and democratic one still the ancient practice of sitting in the stocks or pillory to “get what was coming to you” in the eyes of your local community. That could, of course, as in the case of ‘the Cock Lane Ghost’, mean people passing the hat round and making a collection for you rather than make sure that you ended up injured for life.
But it is true that, when the American colonies declared independence in 1776, there was no longer anywhere to send convicts and the hulks of old ships moored in the Thames Estuary were used to lodge the convicts at night, with them coming out to labour during the day. And the report I saw featured a picture of the hulks, which brought home to public opinion the brutal reality of convict life.
But wartime conditions are atypical in terms of criminal activity, with the impact on the ‘market economy’ creating the potential for Black Marketing and the Black Economy: and, at the same time, ‘joining up’ in the Armed Forces was a ‘way out’ that offered both employment and very often a chance to escape from an old life. When the young William Cobbett tried to join up during the American War the officer clearly thought that this teenager had got some girl pregnant and wanted to disappear or some similar kind of trouble. The Armed Forces offered “leg bail”- a chance to ‘leg it’.
The answer to the problem of the hulks, and also to American independence, seemed to be in the luxuriant possibilities of “Botany Bay” recently discovered by Captain Cook and Joseph Banks in Australia. Here was another wilderness where transported convicts could be sent. But the report on the forthcoming research specifically mentions the immigration records for Tasmania: and the Tasmanian sub-colony from Botany Bay was specifically created as a place to ‘dump’ the most hardened and difficult ‘nasty pieces of work’. Hence the collection of such human ‘Tasmanian Devils’ soon resulted in a deliberate hunting down and extermination of the Aborigines.
No doubt it will be possible to turn all of this into statistics of some kind or other.