Irish Women and Men in Victoria's Prisons, 1850s-1880s

Abstract

Claims that the Catholic Irish-born community in colonial Australia was characterised by high rates of criminal offending were accepted by many contemporaries and have been widely repeated by historians since. Poverty, drunkenness, alienation and prejudice have all been put forward as explanations for lawbreaking. This article, through an analysis of samples of Irish prisoners in late nineteenth-century Victoria, challenges assessments of the levels and nature of Irish crime and the reasons offered for them. It shows that a large proportion of offenders were middle-aged women, not young men as is frequently assumed, and that most were convicted of non-violent, victimless public order offence..