Article of the Week - Penal Colony

A penal colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general populace by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory. Although the term can be used to refer to a correctional facility located in a remote location it is more commonly used to refer to communities of prisoners overseen by wardens or governors having absolute authority.

The British used North America as a penal colony through a system of indentured servitude. Convicts would be transported by merchants and auctioned off to plantation owners upon arrival in the colonies. It is estimated that some 50,000 British convicts were sent to colonial America, representing perhaps one-quarter of all British emigrants during the 18th century. When that avenue closed in the 1780s after the American Revolution, Britain began using parts of what is now known in Australia as penal settlements.

Devil's Island (French: île du Diable) is the third largest island of the ÃŽles du Salut island group in the Atlantic Ocean. It is located approximately 14 km (9 mi) off the coast of French Guiana in South America just north of the town of Kourou. It has an area of 14 ha (34.6 acres). The island was a part of the notorious French penal colony of French Guiana for 101 years, from 1852 to 1953.^[1] The island was used primarily to house political prisoners. 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Devil's Island"