Jenny Kaye said:
It is a ship of serial rapists, murderers, paedophiles etc. This is the last stop for them. Many of them would have personality disorders.
What evidence do you have for this? Blake is a convicted child molester, but according to canon the only criminal records stated are: 1. Vila--recidivist thief (although what he's actually shown doing in subsequent episodes is more like safecracking, which is a specialist skill) 2. Avon--bank fraud (possibly though not certainly embezzlement, which requires abuse of a fiduciary capacity) 3. Jenna--"free trading." It doesn't sound serious enough to merit lifetime exile, but the Federation seems more like the kind of place to heavily punish relatively trivial crimes than to spare the lives of murderers. And, after all, 18th and 19th century Britain did sentence people to transportation for long periods or for life even for trivial property crimes. 4. Gan--manslaughter, with the aggravating factor of killing a law enforcement agent. Canon doesn't say that he killed anyone else (or any female) before the series starts. As has often been remarked, it is never stated what Nova has been convicted of (much less whether he did it or not). Nor is it stated what Salman and Arco were convicted of--or even the names of any of the other prisoners (the ones who died on the London or the ones who stayed behind on Cygnus Alpha). There aren't any canonical lines like "Jenna, watch out for Muggles, he's a rapist" or "It's too bad that a poor little pickpocket like me gets stuck here with a bunch of Broadmoor cases."
-(Y)
PS--judging by the expression on her face, I suspect that what Jenna said to Raiker is a reversal of Blackadder's immortal insult--something about having wedding tackle the size of a weasel's brain.