Short answers, pulled from the story.
Penal transportation was the practice of sentencing convicted criminals to exile in a distant colony for a fixed term or for life. Britain used it from the early 1600s until the last convicts arrived in Western Australia in 1868, a span of roughly 250 years.
During the 80 years of transportation to Australia, roughly 162,000 men and women were sent there in total. By 2015, an estimated 20% of the Australian population had convict ancestry.
The Transportation Act 1717, introduced by William Thomson, the Solicitor General, made transportation a direct sentence rather than a condition of a royal pardon. Non-capital offenders received seven years; those pardoned from capital offences received fourteen years.
The First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay, Sydney on the 18th of January 1788, then moved to Sydney Cove (modern-day Circular Quay) to establish the first permanent European settlement in Australia.
The Cellular Jail in Port Blair, South Andaman Island, also called Kala Pani, was constructed between 1896 and 1906 as a high-security prison with 698 individual cells for solitary confinement. An estimated 80,000 political prisoners were transported there; surviving prisoners were repatriated in 1937 and the settlement was shut down in 1945.
The outbreak of the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) halted transportation to America. Parliament passed the Criminal Law Act 1776, which redirected offenders to hard labor at home. Transportation to North America was not resumed, and Britain eventually turned to Australia as the new destination.
French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894 in an atmosphere of antisemitism and was sent to Devil's Island, the French penal colony in Guiana. His case became a cause known as the Dreyfus Affair, and he was fully exonerated in 1906.