This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Leicester. Between 1415, when the Portuguese first used convicts for colonization purposes in the North African enclave of Ceuta, to the 1960s and the dissolution of Stalin's gulags, global powers including the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, British, Russians, Chinese and Japanese transported millions of convicts to forts, penal settlements and penal colonies all over the world. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies builds on specific regional archives and literatures to write the first global history of penal transportation. The essays explore the idea of penal transportation as an engine of global change, in which political repression and forced labour combined to produce long-term impacts on economy, society and identity. They investigate the varied and interconnected routes convicts took to penal sites across the world, and the relationship of these convict flows to other forms of punishment, unfree labour, military service and indigenous incarceration. They also explore the lived worlds of convicts, including work, culture, religion and intimacy, and convict experience and agency.

The Mettray Penal Colony was a private reformatory without walls, established in France in 1840 for the rehabilitation of young male delinquents. Foucault linked its opening to the most significant change in the modern status of prisons and now, at last, Stephen Toth takes us behind the gates to show how the institution legitimized France's repression of criminal youth and added a unique layer to the nation's carceral system. Drawing on insights from sociology, criminology, critical theory, and social history, Stephen Toth dissects Mettray's social anatomy, exploring inmates' experiences. More than 17,000 young men passed through the reformatory before its closure, and Toth situates their struggles within changing conceptions of childhood and adolescence in modern France. Mettray demonstrates that the colony was an ill-conceived project marked by internal contradictions. Its social order was one of subjection and subversion, as officials struggled for order and inmates struggled for autonomy. Toth's formidable archival work exposes the nature of the relationships between, and among, prisoners and administrators. He explores the daily grind of existence: living conditions, discipline, labor, sex, and violence. Thus, he gives voice to the incarcerated, not simply to the incarcerators, whose ideas and agendas tend to dominate the historical record. Mettray is, above all else, a deeply personal illumination of life inside France's most venerated carceral institution.

In the Penal Colony is a short story by Franz Kafka written in German in October 1914, revised in November 1918, and first published in October 1919. The story is set in an unnamed penal colony. Internal clues and the setting on an island suggest Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden as an influence. As in some of Kafka's other writings, the narrator in this story seems detached from, or perhaps numbed by, events that one would normally expect to be registered with horror. "In the Penal Colony" describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin before letting him die, all in the course of twelve hours. As the plot unfolds, the reader learns more and more about the machine, including its origin and original justification. The story focuses on the Explorer, who is encountering the brutal machine for the first time. Everything about the machine and its purpose is told to him by the Officer. The Soldier and the Condemned (who is unaware that he has been sentenced to die) placidly watch from nearby. The Officer tells of the religious epiphany the executed experience in their last six hours in the machine. Eventually, it becomes clear that the use of the machine and its associated process of justice – the accused is always instantly found guilty, and the law he has broken is inscribed on his body as he slowly dies over a period of 12 hours – has fallen out of favor with the current Commandant. The Officer is nostalgic regarding the torture machine and the values that were initially associated with it. As the last proponent of the machine, he strongly believes in its form of justice and the infallibility of the previous Commandant, who designed and built the device. In fact, the Officer carries its blueprints with him and is the only person who can properly decipher them; no one else is allowed to handle these documents.

A multilayered social and cultural analysis that focuses upon the will of civil society and the will of those who actually lived and worked in the bagne, or penal colony.

This collection considers human rights and incarceration in relation to the liberal-democratic states of Australia, New Zealand and the UK. It presents original case-study material on groups that are disproportionately affected by incarceration, including indigenous populations, children, women, those with disabilities, and refugees or ‘non-citizens’. The book considers how and why human rights are eroded, but also how they can be built and sustained through social, creative, cultural, legal, political and personal acts. It establishes the need for pragmatic reforms as well as the abolition of incarceration. Contributors consider what has, or might, work to secure rights for incarcerated populations, and they critically analyse human rights in their legal, socio-cultural, economic and political contexts. In covering this ground, the book presents a re-invigorated vision of human rights in relation to incarceration. After all, human rights are not static principles; they have to be developed, fought over and engaged with.

New York Times Bestseller New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice "An essential and groundbreaking text in the effort to understand how American criminal justice went so badly awry." —Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me In A Colony in a Nation, New York Times best-selling author and Emmy Award–winning news anchor Chris Hayes upends the national conversation on policing and democracy. Drawing on wide-ranging historical, social, and political analysis, as well as deeply personal experiences with law enforcement, Hayes contends that our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, the law is venerated. In the Colony, fear and order undermine civil rights. With great empathy, Hayes seeks to understand this systemic divide, examining its ties to racial inequality, the omnipresent threat of guns, and the dangerous and unfortunate results of choices made by fear.

The ’punitive turn’ has brought about new ways of thinking about geography and the state, and has highlighted spaces of incarceration as a new terrain for exploration by geographers. Carceral geography offers a geographical perspective on incarceration, and this volume accordingly tracks the ideas, practices and engagements that have shaped the development of this new and vibrant subdiscipline, and scopes out future research directions. By conveying a sense of the debates, directions, and threads within the field of carceral geography, it traces the inner workings of this dynamic field, its synergies with criminology and prison sociology, and its likely future trajectories. Synthesizing existing work in carceral geography, and exploring the future directions it might take, the book develops a notion of the ’carceral’ as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective.

Empire of Convicts focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts.