A Positive Reinforcement Program In A 19th Century Penal Colony

Abstract

From the late 18th Century until 1868 more than 150,000 convicts were “transported” from England to its colony, Australia. Most of the convicts, male and female, had been city dwellers and eight in ten were thieves. Almost all were laborers and destitute. As Robert Hughes points out in The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, until the Prison Acts of 1835 and 1839, England did not have a penitentiary system and thus had to send its convicts elsewhere and that meant Australia. A major Australian destination for those transported was Van Diemen’s Land, now known as Tasmania. The person responsible for the planning and implementation of the positive reinforcement program was Captain Alexander Maconochie. He had personal experience of prison life because he spent more than two years as a prisoner of war in Verdun. He was the only major official of the “transportation system” that shipped convicts to Australia who had ever spent time behind bars. In Australia Maconochie served as the private secretary to John Franklin, the lieutenant governor in charge of Van Diemen’s Land, whose writ also ran to Norfolk Island, a small island in the Pacific more than 1500 miles from Van Diemen’s Land. The penal colony that constituted Norfolk Island would be the place where Maconochie’s program would be tested. Maconochie argued that because the penal system was based solely on punishment it “had produced mainly crushed, resentful and embittered men and women,” (Hughes, 1987, p. 499). Under his “Mark System,” in contrast, the emphasis would be on incentives not punishment. Sentences would be indefinite and the convicts would have to earn a certain number of “marks,” or credits for good behavior and hard work, before they would be freed. “Six thousand marks would be the equivalent of a seven-year sentence; seven thousand would correspond to ten years…” (Hughes, 1987, p. 500). Marks could be exchanged for reduced sentences or for goods, such as extra food, tobacco, and clothing. Maconochie was put in charge of Norfolk Island but he did not think it was suitable for his experiments, primarily because there were already 1200 twice