Oh, man, we've got enough indefinite imprisonment without charges going on as it is. Please don't encourage it.

Once upon a time, people's "data shadows" were very thin indeed. In The Fatal Shore, a truly awesome history book about Australia, they talked about policing in Georgian England. The identification of criminals relied primarily on verbal descriptions of their looks:

Official crime records and registers of criminals were primitive, and there would be no fingerprinting until 1885. Artists made sketches, for popular consumption, of famous offenders... but one could no more recognize a felon from such semi-devotional effigies than pick St. Paul from a crowd by consulting a Byzantine icon. Identification of wanted men had to be made from verbal descriptions in the police gazettes, circulated to mayors and magistrates after the early 1770s... Sketchy as they were, such descriptions did produce some arrests, mainly in villages where people noticed strangers. Some officers of the law had long memories. Henry Fielding's sightless half-brother John, a magistrate known in Bow Street as the "Blind Beak," was said to be able to identify 3000 different malefactors by their voices alone. But on the whole, it was easier for criminals to escape scot-free in the 1780s than it would ever be again.

This meant that, once you had caught a suspected criminal, there was no way to release them temporarily without them disappearing, quite possibly forever. So a lot of crimes were punishable by fines (which could be collected on the spot), or by immediate imprisonment (which is what you got if you couldn't pay the fine), or by death. You couldn't really put people on probation, or parole, or release them on bail.

The result, in practice, was that every person who stole a loaf of bread risked indefinite imprisonment or even death. It was so inhumane (and so expensive -- there weren't enough jails) that the English legal system leapt at the opportunity to solve the problem in a novel way: Transport criminals to the colonies, where they would never bother homelanders again even when they were freed. Until 1776 the favorite colonial destination was the American colonies, but after that the English had to invent the Australian penal colonies...