Penal colony
Penal colonies (from “ punishment ” and “ colony ”) - also known as convict and criminal colonies - are labor camps in remote areas where prisoners serve their sentences. In the 18th and 19th centuries, many penal colonies were founded far away from the respective mother country, such as B. in Siberia , French Guyana and especially on small islands , to make the escape of prisoners difficult or unattractive.
Historical background
The historical background for the increasing number of penal camps from the 18th century on is the European population explosion , the resulting wage-dependent industrial proletariat as well as the associated social question and pauperism .
British colonies
Initially, the Kingdom of Great Britain used the thirteen colonies of North America as penal colonies. After the American Revolution , a new place of transfer had to be found for prisoners. A few years earlier, James Cook had visited the continent of Australia , which was now chosen to be the Australian convict colony, probably the most famous penal colony in the world. From the first transport of prisoners 1787–1788 to the last one in 1868, a total of 162,000 prisoners were exiled to Australia. Penal colonies (1788-1857) were first Sydney and later New South Wales , Norfolk Island , Tasmania and Western Australia , which was initially settled in 1829 as the Swan River Colony without convicts. This form of colonization threatened to fail and around 10,000 convicts were brought there between 1850 and 1868.
In addition to Australia, Bermuda and Gibraltar also served as penal colony for British citizens.
French colonies
France banished many prisoners, especially political opponents of the February Revolution of 1848 , the riots of 1851 and the Paris Commune , to French Guiana and New Caledonia .
French Guiana has been used as a penal colony since 1852. The prisoners were forced to do hard labor here in various camps . The Devil's Island , to which the unjustly convicted Alfred Dreyfus was banished (see Dreyfus affair ) , achieved particular fame .
New Caledonia has been under French rule since 1853. For use as a penal colony - in addition to the banishment of the unpleasant prisoners - the civilization of the local Kanaks was in the foreground. The first 250 French convicts reached New Caledonia in 1864. At that time only the southern third of the main island and some islands in the south were under French control, there was a military outpost in Napoléonville ( Canala ) and otherwise there were only a few plantations (e.g. for sugar cane ) and Marist mission stations next to the Kanak villages. After the defeat of the Paris Commune until the amnesty in July 1880, around 8,000 more French came to the island. Among the Communards were, for example, Louise Michel and Nathalie Lemel .
Siberia
In tsarist Russia, as in the times of the Soviet Union , many forced laborers worked in prison camps near the mines of Siberia . B. on the Kolyma and in the Tscherski Mountains were only dissolved around 1990. The first so-called deportations began in 1754 with expulsions of actual offenders. Often it was less criminals than political prisoners and prisoners of war who were brought there. Among them were z. B. many participants in the Polish uprising in 1863 . In total, more than 400,000 exiles lived in Siberia at the end of the 19th century.
Guantanamo Bay
A current penal colony is the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base . This is where prisoners are brought on charges of terrorism or who are considered unlawful combatants . The human rights situation in this prison has been sharply criticized by both international and civil rights activists. President Barack Obama has been pursuing the closure of the penal colony since campaigning in 2009. However, in December 2013 there were still 162 prisoners in Guantanamo.
See also
literature
Scientific literature
- Joseph Heimberger: Penal colonies: Lecture given in the Gehe Foundation in Dresden on January 13, 1906 . Zahn & Jaensch, Dresden 1906.
- Jürgen Osterhammel: The transformation of the world: A history of the 19th century , Chapter IV: Settled and mobile. C. H. Beck, Munich 2009
- Roger Pérennès: Déportés et forçats de la Commune . Ouest Éditions 1991
Narrative literature
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gunnar Heinsohn, Rolf Knieper, Otto Steiger: People production. General population theory of the modern age . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / M. 1979 ( content )
- ^ Robert Castel: The Metamorphoses of the Social Question. UVK, Konstanz 2008 ( table of contents )
- ^ Convicts and the British colonies in Australia . ( Memento of the original from January 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Australian Government.Retrieved March 7, 2015
- ↑ Michael Lehnert: Here's why it's long past time that we close Guantánamo ( Memento of the original from December 12, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The Detroit Free Press , December 12, 2013.
