<P> Timberlake Wertenbaker's play Our Country's Good, based on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker, is set in the first Australian penal colony . </P> <P> My Transportation for Life, Indian freedom fighter Veer Savarkar's memoir of his imprisonment, is set in the British Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands . </P> <P> The novel Papillon tells the story of Henri Charrière, a French criminal convicted on 26 October 1931 as a murderer, and exiled to the French Guinea penal colony on Devil's Island . A film adaptation of the book was made in 1973, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman . </P> <P> Penal transportation, typically to other planets, sometimes appears in works of science fiction . A classic example is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, in which convicts and political dissidents are transported to lunar colonies . In Heinlein's book, a sentence of lunar transportation is necessarily permanent, as the long - term physiological effects of the moon's weak surface gravity (about one - sixth that of Earth) leave "loonies" unable to return safely to Earth . </P>

Why were english criminals brought to the american colonies