The 18th century represented a period of criminal history known today as the Blood Codes, during the 1700s the death penalty became the standard punishment for many crimes, especially property related ones. However, there is a discrepancy between the increase in laws providing death as punishment and the number of cases actually convicted and sentenced to this punishment. In reality, while the period labeled the Blood Codes saw a significant increase in crime punishable by death, the far more popular and common punishment was transportation. Penal transportation was a punishment that exiled and removed those convicted of crimes to serve their time in one of the penal colonies, usually in Australia, the United States, or modern Tasmania. Convicts sent to these colonies were essentially temporary slaves and would complete forced labor and construction projects in the colony; for many this represented an opportunity to avoid the death penalty and serve the labor sentence, for others transportation became a punishment instead of prison, in this case transportation became much worse than simply serving the sentence in the country of origin. Transportation cannot be fully understood without the framework of the bloody code introduced in the 18th century; these laws changed punishment and dramatically changed the way courts treated inmates, this later pushed the system to increase the use of transportation as punishment. There was an observable change in the way courts handled punishment starting in the late 17th and throughout the 18th century, this period later taking the name of the bloody codes in relation to the amount of cases requiring capital punishment as punishment for.... .. middle of paper ...... definitely in Britain's favour, although this system may have arisen out of a need to protect property, it has developed into a system which may instead benefit the state; Australia particularly demonstrates the difference in transportation from its advent to 1776, when convicts in Australia were predominantly used for their labor and development skills. Ultimately, transportation had little impact on their national decisions until the American Revolution, but it absolutely defined the legal system during this period. The lives of these inmates were undoubtedly harsh and for many inmates they simply delayed the death sentence rather than avoided it. The transportation system worked effectively for the period and made logical sense during its advent for property protection and deterrence, and even more effectively when an empire needed to develop and expand..