Penal military unit

Penal battalions, penal companies, etc., are military formations consisting of convicted persons for which military service in such units was either the assigned punishment or an alternative to imprisonment or capital punishment.

Great Britain

See Battalion of Light Infantry of Africa formed in 1832 and made up of men with prison records who still had to do their military service or soldiers with serious disciplinary problems.
See Régiment pénal de l'Ile de Ré, formed in 1811

See Afrika-Brigade 999 (AKA Bewährungseinheiten 999, Strafbataillon 999, Bewährungstruppe 999, Division 999).

See Galvanized Yankees; during the American Civil War, Confederate prisoners of war who swore allegiance to the Union were allowed to join the Union Army and serve on the western frontier.

The story, "The Warlord" by Soviet writer Vladimir Karpov recounts Karpov's military career from a penal company serviceman to a Guards Colonel awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
Nikolai Dostal's critically acclaimed 11-part television serial, Penal Battalion ("Shtrafbat" ("Штрафбат", Shtrafbat at IMDb ), was released in 2004.
The Dirty Dozen, a 1967 American film about a fictional U.S. penal military unit directed by Robert Aldrich, from the novel by E.M. Nathanson.
The novels by Sven Hassel about the (fictional) 27th Penal Panzer Regiment.
Between Heaven and Hell (film) features a paroled military prisoner sent to a company that contains a variety of misfits.
The hero of Paullina Simons' Bronze Horseman trilogy, Alexander Belov, is sentenced to serve in a Red Army penal battalion.
The Soviet faction in Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 have penal flak infantry units whose quotes convey disapproval of their situation.
The Penal Legions of Warhammer 40,000 consist of prisoners convicted of anything from failure to return library books to murder.

Conquest, Robert, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, Methuen Press, (1978) ISBN 978-0-670-41499-4
Hatch, Gardner N., American Ex-prisoners of War: Non Solum Armis, Turner Publishing Company, (1988), ISBN 978-1-56311-624-7
Krivosheev, G.F. Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the twentieth century, London, Greenhill Books, 1997, ISBN 978-1-85367-280-4, available online (in Russian) [1].
Lebed, Alexander (Gen.), My Life and My Country, Regnery Publishing, Inc. (1997) ISBN 978-0-89526-422-0
Manazeev, Igor, A 'Penal' Corps on the Kalinin Front, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 15, Issue 3, September 2002 OCLC 201968754
Mawdsley, Evan, The Stalin Years: The Soviet Union 1929-1953, Manchester University Press (2003), ISBN 978-0-7190-6377-0
Suvorov, Viktor, Inside The Soviet Army, Hamish Hamilton (1982), ISBN 0-241-10889-6
Tolstoy, Nikolai, Stalin's Secret War, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston (1981), ISBN 0-03-047266-0
Toppe, Alfred, Night Combat, Diane Publishing (1998), ISBN 978-0-7881-7080-5