<P> Transportation from Britain and Ireland officially ended in 1868, although it had become uncommon several years earlier . </P> <P> New Caledonia became a French penal colony from the 1860s until the end of the transportations in 1897 . About 22,000 criminals and political prisoners (most notably Communards) were sent to New Caledonia . </P> <P> In British colonial India, opponents of British rule were transported to the Cellular Jail in the Andaman islands . </P> <P> The most famous transported prisoner is probably French army officer Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly convicted of treason in a trial in 1894, held in an atmosphere of antisemitism . He was sent to Devil's Island, a French penal colony in Guiana . The case became a cause célèbre known as the Dreyfus Affair, and Dreyfus was fully exonerated in 1906 . </P>

Why did britain stop sending convicts to america