Actually, Britain sent a lot of prisoners to the colonies too. I remembered that from a passing remark from my 5th grade teacher lol. amazing what i remember from school.
"The joke about Australia is that it was founded by a bunch of criminals. And from 1788 until 1868, Britain did send roughly 164,000 convicts to the land down under. America’s dirty little secret? The same exact thing was happening here. In fact, experts estimate that over 52,000 British prisoners were shipped off to colonial America.
Britain had been shipping convicts to America for decades before they started sending them to Australia. In fact, it was precisely because of America’s fight for independence that the Brits had to start sending their criminals to Australia."
Wanna read more?
https://gizmodo.com/britain-sent-thousands-of-its-convicts-to-america-not-1707458418
