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Tracking the life histories and criminal careers of Australian prisoners
Learn moreYou can choose to transcribe prison records from either New South Wales or Tasmania. Either way, you will be furthering our knowledge about crime, the prison system and the people who have ended up within it across time.
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About Criminal Characters
Who committed offences, and why? You can help researchers find out by transcribing the records of persons imprisoned from the 1850s through to the 1940s.
Drawing on history, criminology and law, this research project will transform understandings of crime and its history by capturing the first large-scale data on the life histories and offending patterns of Australian criminals across a period extending from the end of the convict era to the beginning of the Second World War.
How did these changing socio-historic contexts and the turbulent events they encompassed affect individual involvement in criminal offending? Are the people revealed by the records the sorts of characters that the public expect? Or will there be surprises?
