Convict Lives

How does Garton attempt to reconcile these two different approaches to convict history?

Garton attempts to reconcile the two different opinions of Australian convicts by showing the cycling link between the treatment of criminals and the resulting responses and behaviours of those convicted. He proposes that ill or rough treatment or punishment of convicts contributed to their continued rough behaviour which in turn produced harsher punishments. Garton suggests that the “legacy” of “the prevailing view... that the convicts, especially women, were a depraved, drunken and corrupt band of ‘incorrigible rogues and villains’”, produced fear of that taint of immorality in society, especially during the nineteenth century. This led to an increase of police presence and which in turn contributed to “the consistently higher rates of incarceration for crime, poverty and delinquency” in early Australian settlements.
In comparing the two views of convicts; that of the good worker forced into crime by social situation and that of the ‘incorrigible rogue and villain’, Garton finds that both arguments focus their attention to the “debate of Australian national character” rather than taking into consideration criminological theories about the ‘origins’ of the convicts. Wood’s idea that the “influence of wider social and moral circumstances” had forced convicts to turn to crime and “vicious habits”, ignores the fact that many of the criminals were repeat offenders, who had little to do with politically protesting the social situation in Britain. Similarly, Clark’s original argument, that “far from being the victims of economic want... the convicts... [were] criminals by choice and training” and were “members of a professional criminal class”, ignores the problems that are raised by the very point of promoting the idea of a ‘criminal class’.
Garton instead suggests that attempting to distinguish between the ‘incorrigible rogue’ and the victim of social repression as the source of the Australian national character is essentially meaningless. Ultimately, for Garton, “these dichotomies, and the struggles over the relative size of each category, have diverted attention from the diversity of convict experience”, the importance should instead be placed on the “effects of policing practices in the construction of criminal groups, the discursive construction of the ‘criminal class’ and the role of crime within the political economy of working class life.”


Left: [Negatives]Two convicts in chains. Most convicts sent to Australian penal colonies were set to work through assignment to settlers. Repeat offenders and the worst of the criminals were sent to harsher penal settlements such as Port Arthur in Tasmania. Under the governance of Captain Charles O'Hara Booth [1833-44] prisoners experienced forms of coporeal punishment that was specifically designed to reform: criminals were considered to have originated from a 'class' that lacked the morals and sensibilities of the upper classes in Europe.

Image source: http://mview.museum.vic.gov.au/paimages/mm/679/67967.htm