RT Article
T1 Prison versus Western Australia: which worked best, the Australian penal colony or the English convict prison system?
JF The British journal of criminology
VO 59
IS 5
SP 1139
OP 1160
A1 Godfrey, Barry S.
LA English
YR 2019
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1672135362
AB 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.
K1 Convicts
K1 Western Australia
K1 Prisons
K1 Reconviction
K1 Recidivism
K1 Sträfling
K1 Western Australien
K1 Bentham, Jeremy
K1 Strafkolonie
DO 10.1093/bjc/azz012