This is a passage from WikiPedia about Penal Transportation to the America's -

The British used colonial North America as a penal colony through a system of indentured servitude. Merchants would transport the convicts and auction them off (for example) to plantation owners upon arrival in the colonies. It is estimated that some 50,000 British convicts were sent to colonial America and the majority landed in the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia.
Transported convicts represented perhaps one-quarter of all British emigrants during the 18th century.[1] The State of Georgia, for example, was first founded by James Edward Oglethorpe who originally intended to use prisoners taken largely from debtors' prison, creating a "Debtor's Colony," where the prisoners could learn trades and work off their debts.
Even though this largely failed, the idea that the state began as a penal colony has persisted, both in popular history and local lore.[2] The British would often ship Irish, Scots, and The Welsh to the Americas whenever rebellions took place in Ireland, Wales or Scotland, but these were sent mostly to Maryland and Virginia, not Georgia.[3]

Tim Radford