Contemplation of the Fourth of July dovetails nicely with a book I’m reading at the moment entitled, The Fatal Shore: The Epic History of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes. The Declaration of Independence by the American colonies led, in a very real way, to the founding of Australia.
England, particularly London, did not have a good grip on its crime situation. Their own notions of liberty led them to resist a regularized police force. Due process given to the accused was relatively permissive. Detection was difficult. But, once convicted, the punishments were draconian — perhaps as a response to the difficulty in locating criminals and obtaining convictions. The privatized jail system they had was inadequate as well as being incredibly harsh and corrupt. And crime was rampant. The gap between those with property and those without had turned into a chasm as urbanization and industrialization started to take hold. Laws designed to protect property from the mob multiplied. But, in overcrowded London, the deterrent effect was questionable.
To relieve the pressure, the British had turned to a system of Transportation for convicts. There was a system that involved convicts taken to America and becoming indentured servants that apparently worked well enough. But, when the Americans declared their independence, they were understandably reluctant to continue serving as a dumping ground for British convicts. And, so, in 1787, Australia’s First Fleet set sail for Botany Bay. It was really a remarkable, almost baffling, undertaking. No Europeans had apparently been to Australia since, 17 years prior in 1770, Captain Cook had landed there. Undertaking the expense and risk to transport six shiploads of convicts (with five support ships) to the far side of the world — not entirely unlike a trip to the moon at the time — to dump your convicts in a place where their prospects were uncertain is perplexing to say the least. Per the Wikipedia article on the First Fleet:
This was one of the world’s greatest sea voyages — eleven vessels carrying about 1,487 people and stores[5] had travelled for 252 days for more than 15,000 miles (24,000 km) without losing a ship. Forty-eight people had died on the journey, a death rate of just over three per cent. Given the rigours of the voyage, the navigational problems, the poor condition and sea-faring inexperience of the convicts, the primitive medical knowledge, the lack of precautions against scurvy, the crammed and foul conditions of the ships, poor planning and inadequate equipment, this was a remarkable achievement.
I was also interested to read that, around this time, Jeremy Bentham was pushing his idea of a penitentiary model called the Panopticon; something I’ve mentioned in these parts before. The idea there was to create a ring of cells around a centralized tower. The cells would be back lit to be visible from the center, but the prisoners couldn’t tell at any given time when a guard was watching them; the result being that they would have to act as if they were being watched at all times and, therefore, their behavior would improve. (Incidentally, I’ve heard this rationale suggested as the survival value added to civilizations by religion — an omniscient, watchful God makes the society’s members act better even when alone, thereby making adherence to the society’s laws more prevalent.) Bentham tried to get one of Australia’s first governors to promise to build a Panopticon in the fledgling prison colony. It didn’t happen – they had their hands full trying to scratch out bare survival, let alone build a modern prison facility.
At the time of America’s founding and Australia’s colonization, English speaking people were very concerned about the rights of property and how to structure society and criminal justice to protect those rights. England, Australia, and the United States have all turned into relatively peaceful, prosperous places. So, maybe we all resolved these questions in more or less satisfactory ways. What we don’t want, is to create such disparities in wealth that we return to the rampant criminality of the 18th century London lower class. We don’t have anywhere to send our criminals anymore.
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