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The Intolerable Hulks: British Shipboard Confinement 1776-1857

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Before the internet facilitated such an endeavor, Charles Campbell exhaustively researched archives, newspapers and books to tease out the essence of, causes and conditions on British prison ships, post-American revolution. When the American Colonies were no longer available a safety valve for those who were systematically excluded from British society because of class, poverty, status as orphans or abandoned children and personal behavior, the government contracted for thousands of convicts to be held in abominable conditions for a set price.
Much in the manner of for-profit prisons today, this foray into short sighted expediency created a horrendous system that dragged on for many decades before the Australian colonies were able to absorb society's outcasts. An epilogue recounts how New York Mayor Ed Koch engaged in the same untenable "solution" to crime and prison overcrowding by commissioning the City's own prison ships in what became an unmitigated economic disaster: Using them cost an average of one million dollars per prisoner.

This is a well researched book that provides a link in the time between convicts being sentenced to transportation from England and their actual transportation. Many of these men were held on the hulks at various ports in England for months and years before being sent to Australia. This book details the names of the hulks, the previous history of the ships and the conditions under which the convicts were held.