The Myth of the Death Barge

There is a story that has circulated in criminal justice classrooms for decades. The version I heard in 1998 sounded like this: Old English authorities chained criminals to the bottom of a ship, set the vessel adrift for weeks, and returned later to dump the bodies after the prisoners starved to death. It is the kind of story that sticks. Brutal. Efficient. Strange enough to feel like a secret that survived through oral retellings.

The problem is that the story is only half true.

• England did use ships as prisons.
• Men did starve, rot, and die in them.
• Bodies were dumped.

But the process was not the ritualized death barge structure that students imagine when they repeat the tale.

The real version is uglier and less cinematic.

When people talk about the origins of American criminal law, they often skip too quickly over the fact that most of it came from English common law. That system did not rely heavily on confinement. It relied on public punishment, transportation, and execution. Jail was a temporary holding mechanism, not a destination. Once the British government needed a way to move prisoners out of overcrowded cells, they turned their attention to ships. Not as mercy. Not as strategy. As a stopgap solution that hardened into a long-term practice.

The prison hulk was a decommissioned ship anchored near shore and stuffed with prisoners. These vessels sat in place for years. They were not seaworthy. They were not meant to travel. They served as floating cages. Conditions were catastrophic.

• Overcrowding,
• disease,
• malnutrition,
• contaminated water,
• infestation,
• sweltering heat,
• frigid cold, and
• neglect

Prisoners were chained. They slept in filth. They worked grueling labor during the day, often hauling materials for naval yards or public works. Mortality rates were staggering. The ships were not drifting death chambers, but they produced death in bulk because survival was almost impossible.

The second major practice was penal transportation. Britain shipped convicts across oceans to colonies including America and Australia. These voyages were long and brutal, and the ships serving that purpose were not designed to keep prisoners alive so much as get them across the water in one piece. Some made it. Many did not.

• Prisoners were shackled in tight quarters for months.
• Food was scarce.
• Disease spread easily.
• The bodies of those who died were thrown overboard along the way.

This is likely where part of the “dump them into the sea” imagery came from when my professor told us that. But the intention was relocation, not deliberate starvation as punishment.

The mythic version—the captain sailing prisoners out until they die, returning later to find an empty hull and a pile of bones—is not supported by historical evidence in any official capacity. It is a compression of two truths.

• One truth is that England did not care whether the people in its custody lived.
• The other is that the conditions on prison hulks and transport ships were so severe that death was, for many, the statistical outcome.

Students hearing that blend of facts often absorb it as a singular ritual: send them out, let them starve, come back later. The real cruelty was not theatrical. It was systemic.

This matters because it shaped the early American approach to punishment. When colonies stopped accepting convicts after the Revolution, Britain leaned even harder on hulks. This era produced some of the worst incarceration conditions of the time.

As American legal systems developed, they borrowed the structural skeleton of English law but gradually replaced transportation and public punishment with confinement. The prison became the primary tool. But the roots of that tool are tied to a country that once used ships as refuse containers for human lives.

When people today fantasize about “cheap, efficient punishment,” the old floating prison stories re-emerge. Frustration with modern incarceration costs, recidivism, and revolving-door justice makes some people romanticize the idea of removing dangerous offenders from society with minimal expense. They picture a ship at sea rather than a facility on land. They imagine cold efficiency replacing overloaded budgets. But the constitutional structure of the United States does not allow for cruelty by design, even if public anger sometimes wishes it would.

The Eighth Amendment forbids punishments that intentionally inflict suffering or degrade human dignity. Starving people in a metal hull would collapse instantly under that standard.

The people who served in those hulks were not always violent criminals. Many were poor, mentally ill, petty offenders, or political dissidents. A system that starves the guilty will starve the innocent just as efficiently. Modern forensic review of wrongful convictions makes this point clearer than any classroom story ever could. It is easy to build a death machine. It is hard to ensure it never touches the wrong person.

The lingering value of studying the hulk era is not in fantasizing about harshness. It is in recognizing the fragility of justice systems. When a government is overwhelmed, under-resourced, or indifferent, cruelty becomes bureaucratic rather than intentional. People died in those ships not because every leader wanted them dead, but because the system saw them as disposable.

That is the lesson worth remembering, not the fictional image of a captain returning to an empty barge. The truth is harsher because it is ordinary. Cruelty without spectacle is still cruelty.

Sources That Don’t Suck:

British Library

National Archives (UK)

The Journal of British Studies

Australian National Maritime Museum

Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice

Scholarly works on penal transportation and prison hulks by reputable historians