Convict Offences Index

 - An index analysing the offences for which we were Transported. - Trade Unionism - belief in Constitutional Government -Human Rights campaigning - victims of poverty - and finally, after 1850, a few trouble makers.-

Convicts offences officially included a wide range of lesser crimes under English law, but the overwhelming majority of convicts, about 85 per cent were transported for "crimes against property".  In theory the majority of these were petty thieves and  pick-pockets.  A relatively small percentage were guilty of serious offences , including to forgery, highway robbery, embezzlement and assault and a few were Transported for offences against military or naval discipline. 

In fact many, possibly most charges were falsified.  People were charged with crimes that the authorities knew they did not commit in order to promote and extend the de-population program in the major cities and to provide class advantage to the ruling elite against social and humanitarian reform in England.   (One of my family 's ancestors was sentenced for theft on the recorded evidence that he did not have any stolen goods in his possession.  Another was sentenced to death by slavery for being drunk and disorderly. - John)

This did not involve charging them with more serious crimes that they had actually committed.  The other way around; it was a strategy of reducing charges specifically to avoid invoking the death sentence.  The government of the day was in bad odour with the people because of its utterly uncaring brutality and too many hangings was making the situation worse.  (The spectre of the French Guillotine was vivid in the minds of the aristocracy, if not in the minds of the people at that time.)  They therefore evolved a tactic of sentencing everyone to death and then granting "Royal Mercy" by commuting the sentence to one of Transportation in order to show how compassionate they were.  The victims were recorded as regularly begging the courts for the "Mercy of the Gallows" of course, as they feared Transportation far more than they feared death.

As the idea of the mass Transportation grew in England, the crimes necessary to earn the punishment progressively reduced to the point of being absolutely trivial.  This was to widen the net of potential transportees of course.   

Then there were the Irish of course, the vast majority of whom were freedom fighters against the English Imperial occupation of their homeland.  They are branded with the taint of criminality even today, yet vast numbers were never charged with anything, nor were they ever brought to trial before a jury of their peers, nor were they ever convicted of any crime. 

Of female convict offences, only eleven percent were sentenced for prostitution.  This needs to be mentioned in order to dispel another English Imperial lie.

They didn't actually start Transporting serious criminals out here in large numbers until the West Australian authorities asked England to supply them with a "slave-labour force" to kick-start their Colonial economy.

Reference
 

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