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Originally Posted by billdan
We could all have been Dutch descendants as they discovered the continent first. I guess the King of Holland didn't have an overcrowded prison problem like the Brits did.
That would make an interesting "What if?" movie.
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Bill, if we're to believe Robert Hughes in his book 'Fatal Shore', it wasn't so much that the pommie prisons were full to over-crowding (although they may have been), the decision to ship them far away was because the thinking of the time was that criminals were in a genetic classification of their own, - in other words criminals were in the family, - sort of 'in the blood'.
So by getting rid of them they'd remove that characteristic from the local gene-pool, and in time be rid of criminals, period.
Of course they didn't know of, or use, terms and concepts like genes and gene-pools, but the basic familial notion was there. And that was how they decided to deal with it. They had a new land that needed 'filling' somehow, so they decided to kill two birds with one stone.