Discuss the history of transportation from its first uses to its end as well as the rationale behind it.

Question

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Answer 1

Another means of “corrections” that was in use by Europeans for roughly 350 years, from the founding of the Virginia Colony in 1607, was transportation (Feeley, 1991). Also used to rid cities and towns of the chronically poor or the criminally inclined, transportation, as with bridewells and gaols, involved a form of privatized corrections, whereby those sentenced to transportation were sold to a ship’s captain. He would in turn sell their labor as indentured servants, usually to do agricultural work, to colonials in America (Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia were partially populated through this method) and to white settlers in Australia. Transportation ended in the American colonies with the Revolutionary War, but was practiced by France to populate Devil’s Island in French Guiana until 1953 (Welch, 2004). In America, transportation provided needed labor to colonies desperate for it. “Following a 1718 law in England, all felons with sentences of 3 years or more were eligible for transport to America. Some were given a choice between hanging or transport” (Johnston, 2009, p. 13S). It is believed that about 50,000 convicts were deposited on American shores from English gaols. If they survived their servitude, which ranged from 1 to 5 years, they became free and might be given tools or even land to make their way in the new world (Orland, 1975, p. 18). Once the American Revolution started, such prisoners from England were transported to Australia, and when settlers there protested the number of entering offenders, the prisoners were sent to penal colonies in that country as well as in New Zealand and Gibraltar (Johnston, 2009).