page_title: Unfree labour
section_title: Prison labour
hierarchical_section_title: Unfree labour / Forms of Unfree Labour / Penal labour / Prison labour
caption_attribution_description: Modern chain gang, Meridian, Texas
context_page_description: Unfree labour is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, violence, compulsion, or other forms of extreme hardship to themselves or members of their families.
  Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery, penal labour and the corresponding institutions, such as debt slavery, serfdom, corvée and labour camps.
context_section_description: Convict or prison labour is another classic form of unfree labour. The forced labour of convicts has often been regarded with lack of sympathy, because of the social stigma attached to people regarded as "common criminals". In some countries and historical periods, however, prison labour has been forced upon people who have been victims of prejudice, convicted of political crimes, convicted of "victimless crimes", or people who committed theft or related offences because they lacked any other means of subsistence—categories of people who typically are entitled to compassion according to current ethical ideas.
  Three British colonies in Australia—New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) and Western Australia—are three examples of the state use of convict labour.  Australia received thousands of convict labourers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were given sentences for crimes ranging from those now considered to be minor misdemeanors to such serious offences as murder, rape and incest.  A considerable number of Irish convicts were sentenced to transportation for 'treason' while fighting for Irish independence from British rule.
  More than 165,000 convicts were transported to Australian colonies from 1788 to 1868. Most British or Irish convicts who were sentenced to transportation, however, completed their sentences in British jails and were not transported at all.
  It is estimated that in the last 50 years more than 50 million people have been sent to Chinese laogai camps.
caption: American prisoner "chain gang" laborers, 2006. Notice the shackles on the feet of the prisoners.
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