Prison versus Western Australia: Which worked best, the Australian penal colony or the English convict prison system?

Godfrey, BS ORCID: 0000-0002-4119-5137 (2019) Prison versus Western Australia: Which worked best, the Australian penal colony or the English convict prison system? The British Journal of Criminology: an international review of crime and society, 59 (5). pp. 1139-1160.

Text
Prison versus WA October 2018BG1.docx - Author Accepted Manuscript
Download (104kB)

Official URL: https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article-abstract/59/5...

Abstract

Between 1850 and 1868, a natural experiment in punishment took place. Men convicted of similar crimes could serve their sentence of penal servitude either in Britain or in Australia. For historians and social scientists, this offers the prospect of addressing a key question posed over 200 years ago by the philosopher, penal theorist and reformer Jeremy Bentham when he authored a lengthy letter entitled ‘Panopticon versus New South Wales: Or, the Panopticon Penitentiary System, and the Penal Colonization System, Compared’. This article answers the underlying tenet of Bentham’s question, ‘Which was best prison or transportation?’ by applying two efficiency tests. The first tests whether UK convicts or Australian convicts had higher rates of reconviction, and the second explores the speed to reconviction.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	convicts, Western Australia, prisons, reconviction, recidivism
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	15 Apr 2019 07:45
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 00:54
DOI:	10.1093/bjc/azz012
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3036908