Life Course Conviction Patterns for Female Convicts in 19th Century Tasmania

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, University of New England

This paper uses multiple record series to explore the interactions between transported female convicts and the court system in Britain and Ireland and Australia. It will outline a series of techniques that can be used to link digitised criminal justice records and administrative datasets in order to create life course series covering thousands of individual lives. This linked data will be used to turn static series into dynamic record sets which can be used to improve understandings of the factors that influenced the prosecution process . It will conclude by outlining the factors that enabled some female convicts to avoid interactions with the colonial court system while others continued to be at risk of prosecution long after they had served out a sentence to transportation.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 30. Archival Prison Data and Its Complexities