Penal labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour that prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.
Male convicts sewing at the Văcărești prison in Bucharest, Romania, 1930s.
Female convicts chained together by their necks for work on a road. Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika c.1890–1927.
Prisoners at the treadmill in Pentonville Prison, London, 1895
Convict labourers in Australia in the early 20th century
Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, or violence, including death or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families.
Clergy on forced labour, by Ivan Vladimirov (Soviet Russia, 1919)
Convict labourers in Australia in the early 19th century
Illustration of Native woman panning for gold
Jewish forced labourers during the Holocaust in Mogilev, Russia, July 1941.
