Since the seventeenth century we have had the recurring notion that there exists a discrete criminal class, and that certainly seems to be the case in gang-ridden places, like El Salvador. In the 1790s Great Britain decided that transportation was a better option than hanging, and thus began a sixty-year experiment to excrete an entire class, and anyone else considered undesirable, to Australia, which was as far away as could be. It worked, to a point, but the surprise was that the offspring of those originally transported committed crimes at a far lower rate than was the avarage in the home country. Even now, Australia remains a remarkably conformist society, despite being well known for personal eccentricity.
Remember that many were transported for petty crimes
A huge number of the Irish were shipped to Australia because of doing anything against the Crown. Most were not seriously violent criminals. I was almost 50 years old before I learned that there was actually food in Ireland during what I now term the Irish starvation, not the Irish famine
The Irish worked on the British absentee landlord’s farms raising grain and beef. It was exported to England. The Irish were only allowed to eat what they could grow on their own tiny and ever growing smaller plots of land. When the potato blight came, the Irish starved. A famine is when there is no food. A starvation is when the absentee landlords and others with all the power deny food.