In the 1840s and 1850s, the Ottoman central government embarked on legal reforms that codified punishments for a range of crimes, including sentences of exile (nefy, te’bid, sürgün) and hard labor (kürek, pranga). By the 1850s, it began to face a series of crises, which included a shortage of prisons and fortresses to house the steadily rising numbers of convicts and exiles; insufficient manpower for transporting them over long distances; and a lack of centralized planning for putting convicts to work and extracting their labor. By the 1860s, the council charged with creating laws and regulations for the enactment of Tanzimat reforms recommended the creation of provincial hard labor prisons to relieve crowding in the Istanbul shipyard and prisons, and to ease the problem of transportation. The project of how to manage exiles and convicts, however, was an ongoing one and, by the 1890s, was increasingly inspired by the laws and practices of rival empires. In this paper, I examine the appeal of the Russian system, which combined internal exile for convicts and dissidents with hard labor and inner colonization. I explore, first, the ways in which statesmen began to articulate the need for an Ottoman Siberia and, second, why they considered the Arab provinces as desirable locations. Drawing on a range of intergovernmental correspondence, the paper considers what plans to construct new penal colonies reveal about changing understandings of “exile” as a legal and carceral practice, as well as what they tell us about Ottoman colonialism. In exploring these questions, I situate exile within the context of a broader literature on imperial knowledge transfer. I also seek to move beyond approaches that focus primarily on intellectuals, elites, and tribal groups, and to show how exile was part of a repertoire of penal reform that included imprisonment and forced labor. By drawing attention to how widely “problem subjects” were punished via forced mobility, the paper makes the case for a more expansive definition of exile in late Ottoman history.