ABSTRACT
There were various reasons for the shift towards the use of imprisonment, some philosophical, others more practical responses; there was a decline in the use of execution by the beginning of the nineteenth century and public executions were ended in 1868, by which time it was often only those convicted for murder that were actually hung. Sending prisoners overseas and banishing them to one of the colonies for their crimes had also uctuated in use, transportation to America had ended with the War of Independence in the 1770s and although the discovery of Australia had relatively quickly become the replacement, it too as a convict destination was under scrutiny in the early decades of the nineteenth century and had all but ended by the 1850s.
