Convicts in Australia
The British Government began transporting convicts overseas to American colonies in the early 17th century. When transportation ended with the start of the American Revolution, an alternative site was needed to relieve further overcrowding of British prisons and hulks. Earlier in 1770, James Cook charted and claimed possession of the east coast of Australia for Britain. Seeking to pre-empt the French colonial empire from expanding into the region, Britain chose Australia as the site of a penal colony, and in 1787, the First Fleet of eleven convict ships set sail for Botany Bay, arriving on 20 January 1788 to found Sydney, New South Wales, the first European settlement on the continent. Other penal colonies were later established in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1803 and Queensland in 1824, while Western Australia, founded in 1829 as a free colony, received convicts from 1850. South Australia and Victoria, established in 1836 and 1850 respectively, remained free colonies. Penal transportation to Australia peaked in the 1830s and dropped off significantly the following decade as protests against the convict system intensified throughout the colonies. In 1868, almost two decades after transportation to the eastern colonies had ceased, the last convict ship arrived in Western Australia.
Punishment in Australia
Prisons in Australia are operated for the detention of minimum, medium, maximum and supermax security prisoners convicted in state and federal courts, as well as prisoners on remand. There is no separate federal prison infrastructure, only state prisons. In the June quarter of 2018, there was 42,855 people imprisoned in Australia, which was an incarceration rate of 222 prisoners per 100,000 adult population., or 172 per 100,000 total population. This represents a sharp increase from previous decades. In 2016-2017 The prisoners were 91% male despite males only being half of the adult population, and 27% of prisoners were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders despite indigenous people only being 2.8% of the population. In 2018, 18.4% of prisoners in Australia were held in private prisons.