From Prison to Society

Abstract

Crime in colonial Australia has attracted considerable scholarly attention, yet comparatively little quantitative analysis. The aggregation of the records of the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction — which operated between 1788 and 1823 as the sole adjudicator of serious crimes in the colony — creates an opportunity for the statistical characterisation of criminal prosecutions during the earliest years after British settlement. Analysis reveals that the frequency of prosecutions as a percentage of population was high during the first decade after British settlement, and then dropped, stabilised, and thereafter, whilst the totality of charges rose, the rate remained proportionate to the growth of population. The distribution of offences prosecuted before the court also changed from more minor to serious crimes over this same period. Deploying both historical and criminological methods, this article argues that changes in the crime before the court was reflective of a profound societal transformation, from a highly scrutinized penal community in the first decade after settlement to a diversified and more complex society thereafter.