The threat of transportation to the colonies

[T]ransportation overseas, in use from 1717 onwards, remained a major alternative option for British law enforcers. Yet exiling convicts from friends, families and familiar lives as a penalty for minor crimes seemed equally disproportionate. Moreover, this policy too was arbitrary in its implementation. Judicial discretion produced major regional variations in trial outcomes. After their conviction, too many prisoners then died in the insanitary ships - known as the 'hulks'- where they were kept while awaiting transportation. And once they had arrived overseas, people's subsequent experiences were also variegated. Hence this penalty also lacked rationality, proportionality and fairness.

That said, the policy of criminal transportation, initially to the North American colonies (before 1776) and then to Australia, continued for a considerable time. Most transportees were adult males from south-east England; but some women were sent too. One was Hannah Rosse, a Londoner described as 'a sort of a dumb [sic], who was speech-impeded or (possibly) shamming. In 1745 she was sentenced to transportation for a second offence of larceny (non-violent theft of goods worth over 12 pence). Rosse's disability won her no leniency, indicating that she had no incentive to be faking it. In all, some 162,400 convicts were taken to Australia between 1788 and 1868. However, this policy was also being slowed, long before it was finally halted. In its last years, it was more of a threat than an actuality. By 1851 the transportees (a number of whom later returned to Britain) constituted only a tiny proportion of the 27 million inhabitants of Britain and Ireland.

- Penelope Cornfield, The Georgians: The Deeds & Misdeeds of 18th-Century Britain, New Haven, 2022, p.215-6.