Penal colony
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The Fatal Shore (1987) is a historical account of the United Kingdom's settlement of Australia as a penal colony with convicts."--Sholem Stein |
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A penal colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general populace by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory.
Although the term can be used to refer to a correctional facility located in a remote location it is more commonly used to refer to communities of prisoners overseen by wardens or governors having absolute authority. Historically penal colonies have often been used for penal labour in an economically underdeveloped part of a state's (usually colonial) territories, and on a far larger scale than a prison farm.
In practice such penal colonies may be little more than slave communities. The British, French, and other colonial empires heavily used North America and other parts of the world as penal colonies to varying degrees, sometimes under the guise of indentured servitude or similar arrangements.
Papillon (1969) is the title of Henri Charrière's autobiographical novel concerning a Frenchman interned on a penal colony in French Guiana, and the 1973 movie directed by Franklin J. Schaffner.
In the Penal Colony is a short story by Franz Kafka upon which the movie La Colonia penal (1970) is based.
For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) by Marcus Clarke deals with the main characters' deportation to the Port Arthur penal colony in Hobart, Australia in 1830.
The events that Sherlock Holmes investigates in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four are set in motion by the background story of Jonathan Small, who had served time in the Andaman Islands penal colony.
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