Wiktionary
n. A colonial territory used (mainly) for the detention and forced labor of deportees, typically where free labor is desperately scarce.
WordNet
n. a penal institution where prisoners are exiled (often located on an island from which escape is difficult or impossible)
Wikipedia
A penal colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general populace by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory. Although the term can be used to refer to a correctional facility located in a remote location it is more commonly used to refer to communities of prisoners overseen by wardens or governors having absolute authority.
Historically penal colonies have often been used for penal labour in an economically underdeveloped part of a state's (usually colonial) territories, and on a far larger scale than a prison farm. In practice such penal colonies may be little more than slave communities. The British, French, and other colonial empires heavily used North America, Australia and other parts of the world as penal colonies to varying degrees, sometimes under the guise of indentured servitude or similar arrangements.
Usage examples of "penal colony".
He was neither a citizen of the penal colony nor a citizen of the state to which it belonged.
He was neither a member of the penal colony nor a citizen of the state to which it belonged.
Colman survived his - two hundred lashes at twice - and he was to have been sent to a penal colony only Dr Redfern intervened - said it would be his death - and he is to be assigned to an estate along the Parramatta together with half a dozen more.
Mr Painter tells me it is reckoned a little better than a penal colony but not much, since the station belongs to a Mr Marsden, a clergyman they call Parson Rapine, who loves having his people flogged, particularly Irish papists.
The Purps had come off Earth, taken over this place and the old Tycho Penal Colony—.
The men were being sent to the penal colony for every offense from murder to pickpocketing.
During a voyage in January of 1856, while he was transporting convicts, a number of them women, to the Australian penal colony at Botany Bay, an inlet south of the present city of Sydney, his ship ran afoul of a violent typhoon while beating north through the Tasman Sea.
He has just such an expert in mind - his ex - girlfriend, Ketrian Altronel, the reason his father stripped him of his noble title and sent him to a penal colony for a year.
That Todd would be found guilty and sent to a penal colony and denied the right to inherit colonial land anywhere?
That can land him right back on a penal colony world, with or without Spacedep approval.
It showed Vray wearing, not the cheap wig he'd received from the penal colony, but an expensive red wig precisely the color of Makluan's hair.
Years later, Kirk helped save his hero when Garth became criminally insane and was being treated at the Elba II penal colony.
He'd told himself it was the bed--far too soft and well contoured after his accommodations at the penal colony--and that the silence in his sterile ship's quarters felt too unnatural after the raucous New Zealand nights.