LONDON, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) -- A new digital record charting the lives of thousands of British convicts shipped to then penal colonies in Australia was unveiled Friday at a conference in Liverpool.
The new Digital Panopticon website draws on over four million records to allow users to uncover how punishment affected the lives of 90,000 individuals convicted of crimes at London's Old Bailey courthouse between 1780 and 1925.
It includes thousands of records of those uprooted by the criminal justice system to carry out their sentences in then newly-established penal colonies in Australia.
The website is aimed at family historians, teachers, crime writers, and academics who can follow the lives of people convicted and transported to Australia or imprisoned in Britain using the free online resource.
Professor Barry Godfrey, a social historian at the University of Liverpool, who led the project, said: "The amount of information is staggeringly huge, it's a resource the likes of which we have never had before."
"It is one of the largest genealogical resources and one of the first to catalogue in chronological order so users can follow the whole life of a person."
Professor Bob Shoemaker, from the University of Sheffield, said: "This free resource demonstrates the impact of punishment on health, family circumstances and future patterns of offending, with clear relevance to contemporary penal regimes."
Tim Hitchcock, professor of digital history at the University of Sussex, said: "The material reveals the lived experience of trial and imprisonment. It really does change our understanding of the history of criminal justice, particularly the importance of both the criminal trial and plea bargaining to the system's evolution."
