Locking in the best price

摘要

When Britain stopped dispatching convicts to its American colonies in 1775, it had to find some other way of dealing with miscreants. So it arranged to have them put away in ships which never left London; convicts were simply locked up in vessels moored on the Thames, whose owners were paid for the service. A few years later, a new penal colony in Australia eased the strain; and prisons shifted firmly back to state control, at least where states existed, for the next two centuries.