Ticket of leave

Convicts who did not observe the conditions of their ticket could be arrested without warrant, tried without recourse to the Supreme Court and have their property forfeited.

The ticket itself was a highly detailed document, listing the place and year the convict was tried, the name of the ship in which he or she was transported and the length of the sentence.

According to Alexander Maconochie, tickets of leave could be suspended in summary fashion for the most "trifling irregularities", and a "very large proportion" of ticket-of-leave holders were returned to government work as a result.

There was no reference in the text to the purpose of conditional release, but ticket of leave was generally understood to be a form of pardon.

That was a significant departure from traditional practice in the use of executive clemency and was an attempt to separate parole decisions from politics.

Even so, because conditional release was still in the hands of an elected minister, public opinion would still have a strong and sometimes questionable influence on policy.

Keeping track of men on tickets of leave was difficult, and the authorities relied on parolees to report every month to the police.