penal colony

Settlement established to receive transported convicts and built in part by convict labour. The first examples of penal colonies were those established by the British in New South Wales, Australia, which began European encroachment on the continent; these included Sydney (Port Jackson; 1788-1840), Newcastle (1804-23), and Port Macquarie (1821-36). The prison regime in these settlements was frequently brutal, leading to many deaths and attempted breakouts and revolts. Other notorious penal colonies were Devil's Island, a French institution off the coast of South America, and the vast network of Soviet forced labour camps (or ‘gulags’) set up under Stalin in remote areas of the Soviet Union, in which millions perished.

Famous descriptions of life in penal colonies include Henry Charrière's Papillon (1969), an autobiographical account of imprisonment on and escape from Devil's Island, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), which draws on the author's own experiences in Siberian camps. A fictional penal colony run by a sadistic commandant is the subject of Franz Kafka's short story ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1919).