From Prison to Society

Abstract

The British settlement in Australia began as a penal outpost and consequently crime, criminals, and criminal justice are fundamental to its early history. 1 The extent of illegal behaviours, and the regulation of moral turpitude, vices, and more vicious acts, has drawn sustained attention from historians and criminologists. 2 However, the picture of crime in the earliest years after settlement remains incomplete. There is a dearth of quantitative analysis of crime trends during the first three decades of British colonial rule to complement a vast qualitative literature, though where applied it has proven useful at testing older theories. 3 Moreover, the existing studies either present fragmentary data or begin decades after first settlement. 4 Nonetheless, the utility of such data is widely recognised and has led to valuable digitisation efforts, notably Finnane and Piper's Prosecution Project, which has made the records of state-based supreme courts from 1823 onwards readily accessible to researchers. 5 This article presents new quantitative analyses of trends in serious crime derived from the records of the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction (hereafter: the Court), 6 the primary court in colonial Australia between first settlement in 1788 and the formation of the state supreme courts in 1823. By so doing, it develops the picture of crime in the colony. More broadly, the data on crime helps trace the dramatic change over the first three decades after settlement from a highly-scrutinized prison environment to a fully-fledged settler-colonial society. 72 From Prison to Society