New South Wales Penal Settlements and the Transformation of Secondary Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

Abstract

This paper uses a comprehensive survey of sentencing patterns and penal regulations to demonstrate the collapse of internal transportation in the colony of New South Wales into a system of extra-penal labour. It argues that a combination of judicial exigencies, local regulations, and creative misinterpretations of metropolitan penal reform turned the penal outpost established in Newcastle in 1804 into an experiment of interest to local and metropolitan reformers - an experiment that was rolled out throughout New South Wales, its peripheries, and in selected outposts of the British Empire after 1820.