HMS Jersey.

This is coolbert:

Prison hulks. Ships, often naval vessels, seaworthiness questionable but still useful as a prison ship.

A practice of yore, the housing of convicts on moored ships an anachronism but perhaps not entirely so.

See this tweet as applicable:

Not necessarily housing for condemned convicts but providing in this case housing for illegal aliens [immigrants] having gained entry to Great Britain by less that normal means. Bibby a barge actually a floating hotel.

My instantaneous response was that the Bibby greatly resembling that ancient and venerable but now anachronistic practice of the prison ship. See however the example of the HM_Prison_Weare from much more modern times. The British greatly fond of the old ways.

"Prison hulks were decommissioned ships that authorities used as floating prisons in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were extensively used in England. The term 'prison hulk' is not synonymous with the related term convict ship. A hulk is a ship that is afloat, but incapable of going to sea, whereas convict ships are seaworthy vessels that transport convicted felons from their place of conviction to their place of banishment."

Read from this Internet article the experience of  "soldiers, sailors and private citizens they [British] had captured in battle or arrested on land or at sea" during the American Revolutionary War.

Atrocity and war crime! I doubt those illegal aliens aboard the Bibby will fare worse if indeed in a negative manner at all! USA also in the modern context accused of employing naval vessels asea to hold suspects as part of the Global War on Terror.

coolbert.