A convict is "a person found guilty of a crime and sentenced by a court" or "a person serving a sentence in prison".[1] Convicts are often also known as "prisoners" or "inmates" or by the slang term "con",[2] 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".
The label of "ex-convict" usually has lifelong implications, such as social stigma or reduced opportunities for employment. The federal government of Australia, for instance, will not, in general, employ an ex-convict, while some state and territory governments may limit the time for or before which a former convict may be employed.[citation needed]
The particular use of the term "convict" in the English-speaking world was to describe the huge numbers of criminals, both male and female, who clogged British gaols in the 18th and early 19th century. Their crimes would today be regarded as petty misdemeanors (stealing small items or food), or are no longer in the criminal code (such as being in unresolved debt). Most of the punishments at this time were severe, with the death penalty (hanging) applied for fairly minor crimes. However, this ultimate sentence was often commuted to a lesser one, commonly for transportation (for 7 or 14 years, or for life) to the colonies. Thus, in the British context, the term "convict" has come to refer in particular to those criminals transported overseas.
Initially many British convicts were sent to the American colonies, such as Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia, as cheap labour. The transportation of convicts from the United Kingdom began around 1615 and became increasingly common in the following years. Initially most people were transported to North America or the West Indies, but from 1718 onwards transportation was entirely to North America. The arrangements ceased when the American Revolutionary War meant it was no longer possible for the United Kingdom to send convicts to what had become the United States.
The British Government then looked to the newly discovered east coast of Australia to use as a penal colony. Convicts were transported to Australia in 1787, arriving in Botany Bay, then Sydney Cove, in January 1788. From the very start of European settlement convicts were used as indentured labourers in five out of the six colonies. Many were used on public works, but a significant number were "assigned" to private individuals as domestic servants, rural workers, etc. Transportation was progressively abolished from 1853, eventually ceasing altogether in 1868.
In Australia, convicts have come to be key figures of cultural mythology and historiography. Many became prominent businesspeople and respected citizens, and some prominent families in present-day Australian society can trace their origins to convict ancestors who rose above their humble origins. However, during the transportation era and for many years after, previous convicts and their descendants tended to hide their former criminal background, sometimes resulting in distorted or completely missing family history. Extensive and comprehensive records kept on every individual are now able to fill in the gaps; and, in fact, many family historians can find out more about their convict ancestors than they can about those who arrived in Australia as free settlers.
↑ Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, p. 311 (2d Coll. Ed. 1978).
↑ Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, p. 292 (2d Coll. Ed. 1978).
↑ Christopher, Emma (2011). A Merciless Place. The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-969593-5.
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.
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.
Penal transportation or 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.
Parole is a form of early release of a prison inmate where the prisoner agrees to abide by certain behavioral conditions, including checking-in with their designated parole officers, or else they may be rearrested and returned to prison.
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 "Bloody Code" was a series of laws in England, Wales and Ireland in the 18th and early 19th centuries which mandated the death penalty for a wide range of crimes. It was not referred to as such in its own time, but the name was given later owing to the sharply increased number of people given the death penalty, even for crimes considered minor or misdemeanor by 21st century standards.
Alexander Maconochie was a Scottish naval officer, geographer, and penal reformer.
An emancipist was a convict sentenced and transported under the convict system to Australia, who had been given a conditional or absolute pardon. The term was also used to refer to those convicts whose sentences had expired, and might sometimes be used of free settlers who supported full civil rights for emancipated convicts.
Crime in Australia is managed by various law enforcement bodies, the federal and state-based criminal justice systems and state-based correctional services.
Penal labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour which 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.
Between 1788 and 1868, about 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland 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. An estimated 50,000 convicts were transported to the British American colonies.
A convict ship was any ship engaged on a voyage to carry convicted felons under sentence of penal transportation from their place of conviction to their place of exile.
A prison, also known as a jail,gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, lock-up, hoosegow or remand center, is a facility in which inmates are confined against their will and usually denied a variety of freedoms under the authority of the state as punishment for various crimes. Prisons are most commonly used within a criminal justice system: people charged with crimes may be imprisoned until their trial; those pleading or being found guilty of crimes at trial may be sentenced to a specified period of imprisonment. In simplest terms, a prison can also be described as a building in which people are legally held as a punishment for a crime they have committed.
Convict women in Australia were British prisoners whom the government increasingly sent out during the era of transportation (1787-1868) in order to develop the penal outpost of New South Wales into a viable colony.
James Hardy Vaux was an English-born convict transported to Australia on three separate occasions. He was the author of Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux including A Vocabulary of the Flash Language, first published in 1819, which is regarded as both the first full length autobiography and first dictionary written in Australia.
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.
Transportation ballads are a genre of broadside ballad some of which became an important part of the folk song traditions of Britain and Ireland. They concern the transportation of convicted criminals firstly to the American colonies and then to penal colonies in Australia. Transportation ballads were published as broadsides,. Many have passed into the folk tradition and have been collected subsequently from traditional singers.
The London garrotting panics were two moral panics that occurred in London in 1856 and 1862–63 over a perceived increase in violent street robbery. Garrotting was a term used for robberies in which the victim was strangled to incapacitate them but came to be used as a catch-all term for what is described today as a mugging.
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