I recently came across a quote from Wikipedia concerning the settlement of Hispaniola by French colonists and privateers: "In order to entice the pirates, the French supplied them with women who had been taken from prisons, accused of prostitution and thieving." How accurate is this statement?

Bertrand d'Ogeron was appointed as the governor of the colonies on Hispaniola/Saint-Domingue and Tortuga in 1664. Previously an officer in the marines, he had joined the Compagnie de l'Amérique Méridionale which ran a colony in French Guiana from 1656 to 1657, as a planter with indentured servants; when it failed, he went to Saint-Domingue and Tortuga, where he was more successful. In 1662, he was made governor of the Bahamas while keeping a continuing presence in his plantations, which led to his promotion with the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales as governor of Tortuga and Saint-Domingue.

These latter two colonies were rough, populated mostly by single men who were living on the edge of society and mainly concentrated on staying alive - not just pirates, but those who'd escaped slavery or indentured servitude, and survivors from shipwrecks or mutinies. D'Ogeron encouraged them to start their own tobacco farms and brought over more indentured servants and free colonists to balance them out, as well as specifically single women who were prepared to become wives.

"Supplied them with women" does imply a certain transactionality to the process, but this is largely a product of the long-standing tendency in history writing to grant agency to men while treating women as resources and objects. The idea that these women were prostitutes from prisons who were brought to the Caribbean whether they wanted to go or not does not seem to be well-attested - books generally don't seem to give a source for the claim, and occasionally it is referred to as a legend. Women certainly had much to gain from going to the New World, just as men did. In the same way that European men wanted to take advantage of the market for land that was plentiful enough (once indigenous claims were disregarded or eroded) for there to be little competition and low prices, European women could take advantage of the low competition in the marriage market in order to marry better than they might have back home. I don't want to make it sound like they were champing at the bit to come across the Atlantic - the French colonial governments had a hard time getting female colonists in the seventeenth century, particularly in Québec, where the filles du roi had to be enticed to come over with state-sponsored dowries and trousseaux - but my point is that men wanted to get married, and there were benefits for women who decided to capitalize on that. The women d'Ogeron cannily transported were not there to be handed over to pirates as concubines, but to build families and towns, and to help create a reason for men to stay after they started to make money.