Penal colony

A penal colony or exile colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general population 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.

Contents

• British Empire
• France
• Americas
• Elsewhere
• See also
• References
• Citations
• Sources
• External links

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.

British Empire

This section needs additional citations for verification . Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.(December 2023) ( Learn how and when to remove this message )

With the passage of the Transportation Act 1717, the British government initiated the penal transportation of indentured servants to Britain's colonies in the Americas, although none of the North American colonies were solely penal colonies. British merchants would be in charge of transporting the convicts across the Atlantic to the colonies where they would be auctioned off to planters. Many of the indentured servants were sentenced to seven year terms, which gave rise to the colloquial term "His Majesty's Seven-Year Passengers". ^{[1] [2] [3] [4]} It is estimated that between 1718 and 1776 about 30,000 convicts were transported to at least nine of the continental colonies, whereas between 1700 and 1775 about 250,000 to 300,000 white immigrants came to the mainland of North America as a whole. More than two-thirds of these felons were transported to the Chesapeake to work for Southern landowners; in Maryland, during the thirty years before 1776, convicts composed more than one-quarter of all immigrants. ^[5] However, it is commonly maintained that the vast majority of felons taken to America were political criminals, not those guilty of social crimes such as theft; for example, it was noted of Virginia that "the crimes of which they were convicted were chiefly political, and the number transported for social crimes was never considerable." ^[6] The colony of Georgia, by contrast, was planned by James Oglethorpe specifically to take in debtors and other social criminals. Oglethorpe referred to them as "the worthy poor" in a philanthropic effort to create a rehabilitative colony where prisoners could earn a second chance at life, learning trades and working off their debts. ^{[7] [8]} The success of Oglethorpe's vision is debated. ^[9]

When routes to the Americas closed after the outbreak of American Revolutionary War in 1776, British prisons started to become overcrowded.^{[ citation needed ]} Since immediate stopgap measures proved themselves ineffective, in 1785 Britain decided to use parts of what is now known as Australia as de jure penal settlements, becoming the first colonies in the British Empire founded solely to house convicts. Leaving Portsmouth, England on 13 May 1787, the First Fleet transported the first ~800 convicts and ~250 marines to Botany Bay.^{[ citation needed ]} Between 1788 and 1868, about 162,000 convicts were transported from Great Britain and Ireland to various penal colonies in Australia. ^[10] Australian penal colonies in late 18th century included Norfolk Island and New South Wales, and in early 19th century also Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) and Moreton Bay (Queensland).^{[ citation needed ]}

Advocates of Irish Home Rule or trade unionism (the Tolpuddle Martyrs) sometimes received sentences of deportation to the Australian colonies.^{[ citation needed ]} Without the allocation of the available convict labour to farmers, to pastoral squatters, and to government projects such as roadbuilding, colonisation of Australia may not have been possible,^{[ citation needed ]} especially considering the considerable drain on non-convict labor caused by several gold rushes that took place in the second half of the 19th century after the flow of convicts had dwindled and (in 1868) ceased. A proposal to make the Cape Colony a penal colony was deeply unpopular with local residents, sparking the Convict crisis of 1849.

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.^{[ citation needed ]}

In British India, the colonial government established various penal colonies. Two of the largest ones were on the Andaman Islands and Hijli. In the early days of settlement, Singapore Island was the recipient of Indian convicts, who were tasked with clearing the jungles for settlement and early public works.^{[ citation needed ]}

France

France sent criminals to tropical penal colonies including Louisiana in the early 18th century. ^[11] Devil's Island in French Guiana, 1852–1939, received forgers and other criminals. New Caledonia and its Isle of Pines in Melanesia (in the South Sea) received transported dissidents like the Communards, Kabyles rebels as well as convicted criminals between the 1860s and 1897.

Americas

Île du Diable

Gorgona Island

San Cristóbal Island

Fernando de Noronha

El Sepa

Tevego

Valdivia

Puerto Luis

Fuerte Bulnes

Ushuaia

class=notpageimage|

Selection of former penal colonies in South America

• Brazil had a prison on the island of Fernando de Noronha from 1938 to 1945.

• Gorgona Island in Colombia housed a state high-security prison from the 1950s. Convicts were dissuaded from escaping by the venomous snakes in the interior of the island and by the sharks patrolling the 30 km to the mainland. The penal colony closed in 1984 and the last prisoners were transferred to the mainland. As of 2015 ^[update] most of the former jail buildings are covered by dense vegetation, but some remain visible.

• Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba is used by the United States as a penal colony. ^{[12] [13] [14] [15]}

• Mexico uses the island of Isla María Madre (in the Marías Islands) as a penal colony. With a small population (fewer than 1,200), 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. Mexico announced on 18 February 2019 that it will close the Islas Marías Federal Prison, replacing it with a new cultural center. ^[16]

• During the 19th century Chile used Fuerte Bulnes and Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan as a penal colony (1844–1852). ^{[17] [18]}

• Ecuador has used two islands in the Galápagos archipelago as penal colonies: the Island of San Cristóbal (1869–1904) and Isabela Island (1945–1959).

• Paraguay's first ruler and supreme dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia opened the penal colony of Tevego in 1813, where mostly petty criminals were sent. It was abandoned in 1823, but re-established in 1843 as San Salvador. It was evacuated towards the end of the Paraguayan War of 1864–1870; soon afterwards Brazilian troops destroyed it.

• Argentina had a penal colony in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, in the Patagonia region. It was active between 1902 and 1947.

• Once Spanish presence in Valdivia was reestablished in 1645 authorities had convicts from all-over the Viceroyalty of Peru construct the Valdivian Fort System. ^[19] The convicts, many of whom were Afro-Peruvians, became later soldier-settlers. ^[19] Close contacts with indigenous Mapuche meant many soldiers spoke Spanish and had some command of Mapudungun. ^[20]

Elsewhere

• Following Alexander the Great's conquest of modern day Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom was used as a penal colony. ^[21] Today, 18% of the population of Peshawar has Greek genetic markers. ^[22]
• The Meiji Government of Japan used Abashiri Prison in Abashiri, Hokkaido as a penal colony in 1890. The prison later turned into ordinary jail in 1894.
• The Qing Empire of 1636–1912 used general-ruled provinces Jilin (Ningguta) in north-east China and Xinjiang in north-west China as penal colonies. ^[23]
• Imperial Russia used Siberia and Russian Far East for penal colonies (katorga) for criminals and dissidents. Though geographically contiguous with heartland Russia, Siberia provided both remoteness and a harsh climate. In 1857 a penal colony was established on the island of Sakhalin. The Soviet Gulag system and its tsarist predecessor, the katorga system, provided penal labor to develop forestry, logging, and mining industries, construction enterprises, as well as highways and railroads across Siberia and in other areas. In modern Russian Federation, corrective labor colonies are a common type of prison.
• The Kingdom of Hawaii under the rule of King Kamehameha III (reigned 1825–1854) 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.
• Boven Digoel in Papua was once used by Dutch East Indies authorities as penal colony for revolutionaries.
• Buru Island in Indonesia was used as a penal colony during the New Order era to hold political prisoners.
• Apartheid South Africa used Robben Island as a penal colony for anti-apartheid activists.
• The Netherlands had a penal colony from the late 19th century. The Department of Justice took over the town of Veenhuizen (originally set up by a private company to "re-educate" vagrants from the large cities in the west like Amsterdam) to turn it into a collection of prison buildings. The town stands 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.
• Some sources refer to Nazi-era forced-labor camps ( Arbeitslager ) in German-occupied Europe as penal colonies. ^[24]
• North Korea operates a penal system including prison labor camps and re-education camps. ^[25]
• Tarrafal operated as a Portuguese penal colony in the Cape Verde Islands, set up in 1936 by the head of the Portuguese government, Salazar, where opponents of this right-wing regime were sent. At least 32 anarchists, communists and other opponents of Salazar's regime died in this camp. The camp closed in 1954 but re-opened in the 1970s to jail African leaders fighting Portuguese colonialism.
• Spain maintained a penal colony on Fernando Po in present-day Equatorial Guinea. ^[26] The tiny island of Cabrera was also a short-lived penal colony in which approximately 7,000 French prisoners of war from the Battle of Bailén (1808) were left on their own for years; less than half of them survived. ^[27]
• Taiwan had a penal colony at Green Island during Chiang Kai Shek's White Terror of 1949–1987. As of 2015 ^[update] the island is a tourist destination.
• Côn Đảo Island in Vietnam was used as a penal colony both by the French colonists (from 1861 onwards) and by the Republic of Vietnam (from 1954 and during the Vietnam War of 1955–1975).^{[ citation needed ]}
• The Ottoman Empire used Fezzan as a penal colony, because it was the most remote province from then the capital city, Istanbul.^{[ citation needed ]}
• There are penal colonies in the Philippines, namely Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm in Palawan, and Davao Prison and Penal Farm in Davao.

See also

• Alcatraz
• History of Australia

Related Research Articles

The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й", but the full official name of the agency changed several times.

The penal colony of Cayenne, commonly known as Devil's Island, was a French penal colony that operated for 100 years, from 1852 to 1952, and officially closed in 1953, in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana.

A convict is "a person found guilty of a crime and sentenced by a court" or "a person serving a sentence in prison". Convicts are often also known as "prisoners" or "inmates" or by the slang term "con", while a common label for former convicts, especially those recently released from prison, is "ex-con" ("ex-convict"). Persons convicted and sentenced to non-custodial sentences tend not to be described as "convicts".

Penal transportation was the relocation of convicted criminals, or other persons regarded as undesirable, to a distant place, often a colony, for a specified term; later, specifically established penal colonies became their destination. While the prisoners may have been released once the sentences were served, they generally did not have the resources to return home.

A chain gang or road gang is a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work as a form of punishment. Such punishment might include repairing buildings, building roads, or clearing land. The system was notably used in the convict era of Australia and in the Southern United States. By 1955 it had largely been phased out in the U.S., with Georgia among the last states to abandon the practice. North Carolina continued to use chain gangs into the 1970s. Chain gangs were reintroduced by a few states during the "get tough on crime" 1990s: In 1995, Alabama was the first state to revive them. The experiment ended after about one year in all states except Arizona, where in Maricopa County inmates can still volunteer for a chain gang to earn credit toward a high school diploma or avoid disciplinary lockdowns for rule infractions.

A labor camp or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons. Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators. Convention no. 105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO), adopted internationally on 27 June 1957, abolished camps of forced labor.

A military prison is a prison operated by a military. Military prisons are used variously to house prisoners of war, unlawful combatants, those whose freedom is deemed a national security risk by the military or national authorities, and members of the military found guilty of a serious crime. There are two types: penal and confinement-oriented, where captured enemy combatants are confined for military reasons until hostilities cease. Most militaries have some sort of military police unit operating at the divisional level or below to perform many of the same functions as civilian police, from traffic-control to the arrest of violent offenders and the supervision of detainees and prisoners of war.

The rights of civilian and military prisoners are governed by both national and international law. International conventions include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the United Nations' Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Penal labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour that prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.

The convict era of Western Australia was the period during which Western Australia was a penal colony of the British Empire. Although it received small numbers of juvenile offenders from 1842, it was not formally constituted as a penal colony until 1849. Between 1850 and 1868, 9,721 convicts were transported to Western Australia on 43 convict ship voyages. Transportation ceased in 1868, but it was many years until the colony ceased to have any convicts in its care.

A prison farm is a large correctional facility where penal labor convicts are forced to work—legally or illegally—on a farm, usually for manual labor, largely in the open air, such as in agriculture, logging, quarrying, and mining. In the United States, such forced labor is made legal by the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution; however, some other parts of the world have made penal labor illegal. The concepts of prison farm and labor camp overlap, with the idea that the prisoners are forced to work. The historical equivalent on a very large scale was called a penal colony.

Between 1788 and 1868 the British penal system transported about 162,000 convicts from Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, India, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the West Indies and Mauritius to various penal colonies in Australia.

The Piracy Act 1717, sometimes called the Transportation Act 1717, was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain that established a regulated, bonded system to transport criminals to colonies in North America for indentured service, as a punishment for those convicted or attainted in Great Britain, excluding Scotland. The Act established a seven-year transportation sentence as a punishment for people convicted of lesser felonies, and a fourteen-year sentence for more serious crimes, in lieu of capital punishment. Completion of the sentence had the effect of a pardon; the punishment for returning before completion was death. It is commonly accepted that 30,000 convicts may have been transported to the British American colonies, with some estimates going as high as 50,000.

A corrective colony is the most common type of prison in Russia and some other post-Soviet states. Such colonies combine penal detention with compulsory work. The system of labor colonies and camps originated in 1929, and after 1953, the corrective penal colonies in the Soviet Union developed as a post-Stalin replacement of the Gulag labor camp system.

The Federal Penitentiary Service is a federal agency of the Ministry of Justice of Russia responsible for correctional services.

Imprisonment began to replace other forms of criminal punishment in the United States just before the American Revolution, though penal incarceration efforts had been ongoing in England since as early as the 1500s, and prisons in the form of dungeons and various detention facilities had existed as early as the first sovereign states. In colonial times, courts and magistrates would impose punishments including fines, forced labor, public restraint, flogging, maiming, and death, with sheriffs detaining some defendants awaiting trial. The use of confinement as a punishment in itself was originally seen as a more humane alternative to capital and corporal punishment, especially among Quakers in Pennsylvania. Prison building efforts in the United States came in three major waves. The first began during the Jacksonian Era and led to the widespread use of imprisonment and rehabilitative labor as the primary penalty for most crimes in nearly all states by the time of the American Civil War. The second began after the Civil War and gained momentum during the Progressive Era, bringing a number of new mechanisms—such as parole, probation, and indeterminate sentencing—into the mainstream of American penal practice. Finally, since the early 1970s, the United States has engaged in a historically unprecedented expansion of its imprisonment systems at both the federal and state level. Since 1973, the number of incarcerated persons in the United States has increased five-fold. Now, about 2,200,000 people, or 3.2 percent of the adult population, are imprisoned in the United States, and about 7,000,000 are under supervision of some form in the correctional system, including parole and probation. Periods of prison construction and reform produced major changes in the structure of prison systems and their missions, the responsibilities of federal and state agencies for administering and supervising them, as well as the legal and political status of prisoners themselves.

Ross Island Penal Colony was a convict settlement that was established in 1858 in the remote Andaman Islands by the British colonial government in India, primarily to jail a large number of prisoners from the Indian Rebellion of 1857, also known as the Indian Mutiny. With the establishment of the penal colony at Ross Island, the British administration made it the administrative headquarters for the entire group of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and built bungalows and other facilities on the site. This colony was meant as "manageable models of colonial governance and rehabilitation". The Chief Commissioner's residence was located at the highest point on the island. Over time, several other islands including Chatham and Viper were used for the penal colony.

The penal colony of New Caledonia was a penitentiary establishment which was in operation from 1864 to 1924. Many French prisoners from mainland France were deported there.

Federal Governmental Institution — penal colony No. 18 of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, commonly known as the Polar Owl is a Russian prison located on the bank of the Sob River near the Polar Urals in the Kharp urban-type settlement. It is one of the seven supermax corrective labor colonies operated by the Federal Penitentiary Service for convicts sentenced to life imprisonment in Russia. In addition to special regimen it has sections with common and strict regimens.

References

External links

• Media related to Penal colonies at Wikimedia Commons