Crimes and punishment -

Imagine you walking to the shops and finding policemen armed with rifles and wooden bats everywhere around you, I am guessing you would feel frightened by these powerful people who has the rights to do anything with you. This was normal in Ballarat because most gold miners did not have a license to pan for gold.

Police these days are armed with many advanced technology such as pepper spray, metal bats, head gear, Handcuffs, bulletproof vest and hand guns. Back then, they had hand cuffs made for children, women and men.Although if the policeman did not have all three sizes, he would use a wooden bat to smash all the bones in your wrist to make your hand swollen and fit into the cuffs.The 1850's policemen also carried rifles whose bullets was designed to go through anything although its accuracy was very poor. If a policeman was to shoot a target 8 metres away from him, it would be very unlikely that he would hit it.

Many crimes were made including murders, robberies, rapes, feuds and so on. The way laws punished these crimes were jail, hangings and transportation to another place.

On of a famous crime that happened was about a gold buyer called Edward Ritter and his brother-in-law Samuel Maxwell Alexander were riding in their chaise-cart from St. Kilda to Melbourne when they came across a gang of 8 men who attempted to hold them up near Canvas Town, but Ritter managed to pull away from the robbers. Many shots fired of which 3 hit Ritter in the leg but there was no major injuries.Ritter and Alexander managed to remember a good descriptions of their robbers, two of whom had been amongst a similar group who had tried to rob Ritter about three weeks earlier. The Government offered a reward of £1600, calculated at £200 per head, for their arrests leading to conviction, and the Melbourne police began to round up likely suspects.One of these men, James Grimes, had been arrested on suspicion of taking part in the Nelson Robbery in 1852, but there had been insufficient evidence to convict him.

Now today, crimes includes murder, rape, feuds, robberies, pedafiles and sexual/ verbal abuse. All of these above would be put in jail for a series of time or be sent off over seas to be executed. Most people says that today's punishments are too weak.