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Museums are increasingly placed front-and-centre in police headquarters. Based on interviews, field notes, and observations, we examine the significance of placing museums in the foyers of new police headquarters for public culture and police legitimacy. Drawing from critical heritage, cultural and policing studies literature, we argue the trend represents a strategic means of softening the image of police and creating myths central to reinforcing their legitimacy. We show that studying the representations inside police museums is crucial to comprehend how these entities depict social reality and provide frames through which the public make sense of policing and carcerality more broadly. Conceptualizing police museums as a form of public relations management that has material impacts on urban life and public culture, we reflect on what our findings mean for literature on cultural representations of “criminal justice.”

This paper investigates the partnership between Correctional Service Canada, the City of Kingston, and United Way, which has transformed the decommissioned Kingston Penitentiary into a site central to the growth of local tourism, film and charitable industries in Kingston, Ontario. In particular, we examine the political and social implications of this prison-municipal-charitable partnership for the institutions involved, marginalized and criminalized people in the region, prison tourists, and penal policy in Canada. Investigating neo-institutional and network relationships, we argue that features of “embeddedness” and “indebtedness” between these institutions reinscribe neoliberal policy responses to social harm and economic challenges. We contend this partnership—which constitutes a regional growth machine—undermines the stated efforts of the aforementioned partners to reduce inequality and improve the lives of people pushed to the margins, thus perpetuating and further entrenching the penal status quo.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed large segments of the global population to the experience of restricted freedoms. In Canada, COVID-19-related measures led to a decrease of mobility within the country, prohibiting access to public and private spaces for prolonged periods of time. This study addresses the effects of the pandemic and related restrictions on views of imprisonment, drawing on a sample of individuals who took part in a tour of the HI Ottawa Jail Hostel (N = 102) in pre- and peri-COVID-19 contexts. The results provide some support for the hypothesis that the uncertainty and existential threat brought about by the pandemic may have contributed to more stringent support for imprisonment and increased punitiveness. However, the results are limited by the small sample size and sample composition. Future directions for research on the impact of the pandemic on public views of imprisonment are discussed.La pandémie de COVID-19 a eu pour effet d'exposer une grande partie de la population mondiale à vivre avec des restrictions de libertés individuelles. Au Canada, les mesures liées à la COVID-19 ont entraîné une diminution de la mobilité à l'intérieur du pays, limitant donc l'accès aux espaces publics et privés durant des périodes prolongées. Cette étude porte sur les effets de la pandémie et des restrictions connexes sur les perceptions de l'emprisonnement. L’étude s'appuie sur un échantillon de personnes qui ont participé à une visite guidée du HI Ottawa Jail Hostel (N = 102) dans des contextes pré-COVID-19 et durant la pandémie de COVID-19. Les résultats soutiennent, dans une certaine mesure, l'hypothèse que l'incertitude et la menace existentielle provoquées par la pandémie pourraient avoir contribué à une perspective plus sévère face à l'emprisonnement et à une punitivité accrue. Cependant, ces résultats sont limités par la petite taille et la composition de l’échantillon de l’étude. De futurs chantiers de recherche sur l'impact de la pandémie sur l'opinion publique face à l'emprisonnement sont discutés.

Drawing from interviews, fieldnotes, and visual data, we examine representations of policewomen and gender communicated in Canadian police museums. We examine four trends from our dataset. First, w...

We draw from literature on penal imaginaries to examine representations at fright nights and other staged cultural scenes from across Canada and the United States that reproduce justifications for imprisonment and punishment. Based on an analysis of online content and news coverage of fright nights organized at forts, sanitoria, psychiatric institutions/asylums, and segregated schools, we demonstrate that these displays mobilize stereotypes and shame to denigrate prisoners and naturalize imprisonment. Moreover, we show that these displays invoke health tropes concerning contagion to intensify fears regarding prisoners by portraying them as a threat to the social body, further rationalizing the existence of human caging as a means of addressing social unease and anxieties. Relying on ideas of risk and contamination, this penal imaginary reproduces punitive ideas that normalize the deprivation of liberty including in (COVID-19) pandemic times. We conclude by discussing the significance of our findings for the study of penal imaginaries and penal spectatorship.

Abolitionism is an important, but often overlooked, theoretical and political alternative to the failings and injustices of the penal system and other forms of social control. While many have docum...

Des anciennes prisons transformees en musees sont repandues a travers le monde. Ces musees peuvent-ils alimenter le projet abolitionniste ou, a l’inverse, faire obstacle au demantelement du systeme carceral ? A partir d’une etude portant sur 45 musees de prison au Canada, cet article demontre que, dans la majorite des cas, ces sites reaffirment les definition etatiques, juridiques et populaires de ce qui constitue un « crime », diabolisent les « criminels » de maniere qui sert a justifier leur criminalisation et leur captivite et avancent l’idee que la justice punitive est une reaction sociale appropriee suivant des prejudices qui sont actuellement criminalises et punis.

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Wardens figure centrally as part of the plot in popular culture representations of prisons such as in films (e.g. The Shawshank Redemption) and television (e.g. Wentworth). Yet little is known about how wardens are depicted in another form of criminal justice popular culture: the penal history museum. This paper examines representations of wardens observed as part of a study of 45 punishment memorialization sites across Canada. We analyze the symbolism used in these penal history museums, as well as the framing used to curate warden-related objects. Our analysis reveals that positive representations of prison wardens depict them as family-oriented, benevolent men of a strong character, who embody and command respect for authority. We found fewer representations that were critical of warden's work. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of our findings for literature on cultural depictions of penality and justice.

Il y a eu des différences importantes concernant la divulgation proactive des cas de coronavirus, parmi les prisonniers et le personnel pénitentiaire, entre les juridictions canadiennes au cours des deux premières années de la pandémie COVID-19. S’appuyant sur la littérature sur la police des connaissances criminologiques et l’opacité des prisons, cet article aborde comment de multiples approches de la criminologie de l’actualité (« newsmaking criminology »), sous la forme d’articles de blogues, de rédaction d’éditoriaux, de publication de rapports et de commentaires d’experts, peuvent aider à remettre en question le manque de transparence de l’État afin de générer une divulgation proactive d’informations supplémentaires sur l’impact et la gestion du coronavirus derrière les murs de la prison. Nous explorons comment l’approche « inonder l’espace » des débats publics sur la gestion de la pandémie avec les informations limitées et incomplètes mises à disposition par les autorités fonctionne comme une stratégie de mobilisation des connaissances et de recherche pour faciliter la diffusion d’informations précédemment non publiées qui sont essentielles pour éclairer les politiques, les pratiques et les résultats de l’enfermement. Ce faisant, nous soulignons la valeur de la criminologie de l’actualité non seulement comme moyen de communiquer et de mobiliser les connaissances criminologiques, mais aussi de les générer au service de la recherche émancipatrice et militante., Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian jurisdictions have varied in terms of their reporting of COVID-19 cases amongst prisoners and prison staff. By engaging with the literature focused on the policing of criminological knowledge and prison opacity, this paper examines how multiple approaches to newsmaking criminology in the form of blog posts, op-ed writing, the publishing of reports, and expert commentary can challenge state secrecy in ways that help generate proactive disclosure of additional information regarding the impact and management of the coronavirus behind prison walls. We explore how “flooding the zone” of public debates on pandemic management with the limited and incomplete data made available by authorities works as a knowledge mobilization and research strategy to help reveal previously unpublished information critical to better understanding prison policy, practice and outcomes. In so doing, we highlight the value of newsmaking criminology not only as a means of communicating and mobilizing criminological knowledge, but also of generating it in the service of emancipatory research and advocacy., Durante los dos primeros años de la pandemia de COVID-19, hubo diferencias significativas en la divulgación proactiva de los casos de coronavirus, entre los reclusos y el personal penitenciario, entre las jurisdicciones canadienses. Basándose en los estudios sobre la vigilancia del conocimiento criminológico y la opacidad de las prisiones, este artículo analiza cómo los múltiples enfoques de la criminología mediática (« newsmaking criminology »), en forma de entradas de blog, redacción de editoriales, publicación de informes y comentarios de expertos, pueden ayudar a cuestionar la falta de transparencia del Estado para generar una divulgación proactiva de información adicional sobre el impacto y la gestión del coronavirus tras los muros de las prisiones. Exploramos cómo el enfoque de « inundar el espacio » de los debates públicos sobre la gestión de la pandemia con la información limitada e incompleta puesta a disposición por las autoridades funciona como una estrategia de movilización del conocimiento y de investigación para facilitar la difusión de información inédita que es fundamental para informar la política, la práctica y los resultados del confinamiento. De este modo, destacamos el valor de la criminología mediática no sólo como medio de comunicación y movilización del conocimiento criminológico, sino también para generarlo al servicio de la investigación emancipadora y activista.

Police museums have been described as dark tourism destinations that depict death and suffering, yet rarely have they been conceptualised as a form of penal tourism. Applying Diarmaid Harkin’s noti...

This article examines how provincial and territorial government agencies and prison authorities in Canada promote new penal infrastructure initiatives. Through an analysis of press releases, websites, opening ceremonies and open houses to promote jail and prison construction projects, our analysis reveals discourses that are legitimating carceral expansion in the Canadian context including: the pursuit of public safety and institutional security; providing opportunities for rehabilitation and healing; addressing the legacies of colonization through the ‘indigenizing’ of imprisonment; generating economic stimulus through prison-related employment and other financial contributions; and the establishment of ‘environmentally-friendly’ prisons. Drawing from government records obtained using Access to Information and Freedom of Information requests, we also provide examples of how front stage messages communicated to the public are assembled by bureaucrats and marketing firms in the back stage of these ...

Beckett and Murakawa conceptualize the ‘shadow carceral state’ as institutions deriving their authority from administrative and civil law that dole out punishment in conjunction with the penal state. This concept enriches criminological inquiry by expanding the boundaries of what punishment work entails. Left unexplored are the contributions of memory institutions such as penitentiary, prison and jail museums intersecting with the penal state that bolster the latter’s power to deprive liberty and inflict pain. Based on an analysis of three Canadian penal history museums, we illustrate how Correctional Service Canada mobilizes federal prison labour and other involuntary prisoner contributions, as well as agency staffing and resources to naturalize punishment. After examining this symbiosis between punishment and its memorialization, we argue for a conception of the shadow carceral state that includes cultural entities and processes which reproduce state control as a dominant way of responding to criminalized conflicts and harms.

Although the existing penal tourism literature examines displays at penal heritage sites, little research has explored the work of tour guides within them. Drawing from interviews and observations, this article assesses the styles of tour guides working at penal history museums in Canada. We situate carceral guides' styles along a continuum encompassing those who claim to convey historical facts as well as ones who explicitly engage in staging and performance, which are primarily responsive to penal tourists' expectations for fun and entertainment. In the discussion and conclusion, we address the practical implications of this assessment of guide styles. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

While much of the penal tourism literature focuses on historically significant and infamous penitentiary, prison, and jail museums, such as Alcatraz and Eastern State Penitentiary in the United States, there exist many smaller, rural sites, including decommissioned local jails and lock-ups, where confinement and punishment are represented. Based on a 5-year qualitative study, this article examines the scope of large and small penal history museums across Canada. Offering a typology to aid criminologists and criminal justice scholars in understanding cultural sites that shape public meanings of imprisonment and punishment, we contribute to the penal tourism and dark tourism literatures by analysing museum displays. We make comparisons with national meanings found in studies concerning penal history museums across Australia, South Africa, and the United States and reflect upon the factors animating the emergence of these sites in Canada. We conclude with a discussion on the significance of our findings for criminological and penal tourism literatures.

Existing literature on the commodification of punishment has yet to examine small penal history museums or related issues of tourism marketing, networking, and souvenirs. Bringing this literature into conversation with tourism studies, we examine how penal history sites attempt to attract visitors and generate revenue to sustain their operations. Drawing on findings from a 5-year qualitative study of penal history museums across Canada, we argue tourism operators use three strategies for the marketing of commodified punishment: authenticity, historical specificity, and exclusiveness. Our findings also indicate that networking between these sites is underdeveloped and that the souvenirs sold to visitors are an important source of museum funding. Overall, we show that the concepts of marketing, networking, and souvenirs can comprise a key conceptual framework for examining consumption in small tourism enterprises in Canada and internationally. Our findings also raise questions about how to theorize and investigate museum management, solvency, and profitability in the penal and dark tourism sector.

Penal history museums are among the sites where cultural meanings about prisoners and imprisonment are developed, communicated, and consumed. Little research has explored what visitors take from these encounters. Drawing on literature concerning new media communication and Brown’s (2009) work on penal spectatorship, we analyze visitor comments about their sojourns into Canadian penal history sites found on TripAdvisor, a global travel website. We delve into the diverse stories that tourists share about their encounters with representations of incarceration, which we have found address the following themes: the performance of on-site actors; perceived authenticity of experiences and emotions; the convenience of visiting museums; attitudes about imprisonment; and views of penal history. Our research suggests that visits to penal history museums in Canada seldom translate into humanizing conceptions of the criminalized and views that challenge punitiveness among visitors, at least online. We also highlight how new media communications shape the actions of penal history museum workers in ways that tend to reinforce memorialization practices that foster social distance between authors and recipients of punishment.

Literature on penal tourism has examined meanings of imprisonment and punishment communicated in infamous American (e.g. Alcatraz, Eastern State Penitentiary), Australian (e.g. Fannie Bay Gaol, Port Arthur) and South African (e.g. Robben Island) sites. Yet such research has not extensively drawn from academic debates on authenticity and heritage that have become prominent in tourism research. This article examines the staging of authenticity in lesser-known penal history museums located across Canada. Whether large and aesthetically impressive or small and dingy, the existence of museums in original heritage penal sites raises questions about authenticity and how it is staged. Based on an analysis of field notes and interviews from visits to 45 penal history sites in Canada, we present four strategies (preservation, restoration, importation and creation) used by staff and volunteers at penal history museums to draw attention to four types of authenticity (architectural and spatial, tactile and visual, existential and narrative) that reinforce claims about the purported realities of incarceration found therein.

Recent criminological scholarship on penal history museums has shown how sites of popular culture tend to silence the voices of prisoners and present them in ways that legitimate the deprivation of their liberty. While representations that reinforce the penal status quo are observable at most Canadian penal history sites, there are outliers that situate imprisonment as a form of oppression, and account for prisoners’ struggles and resistance. Drawing on three case studies from a 5-year qualitative research project on Canadian lock-up, jail, prison and penitentiary museums, we discuss what critical punishment memorialization looks like in a context of penal intensification in Canada. We show how such critical representations depend on the historical contextualization of penality as a manifestation of colonialism and/or the incorporation of prisoners’ voices and standpoint. We argue that the critical representations and narratives at these museum sites open up possibilities for the social distance between penal spectators and the incarcerated to be diminished by bringing humanizing prisoner narratives into focus in an otherwise dark tourist space.

Decommissioned carceral sites that have been transformed into penal history museums serve as popular destinations for visitors. There are hundreds of other penal history museums across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania (Wilson et al. 2017) that similarly claim to offer a rare chance for “those on the ‘outside’ to access life ‘inside’” (Turner and Peters 2015, p. 72). Ross (2012) uncovered 95 penal history museums in operation worldwide. More recent investigations, such as a study by Walby and Piche (2015a), which identified at least 45 museums in the Canadian context alone memorializing the history of imprisonment in settings that include former penitentiaries, prisons, jails and lock-ups, have pushed this global count to well over one hundred. This chapter explores representations of escape in these sites of punishment memorialization.

Appendix

In this article, we reflect on the position of researcher-as-facilitator of prisoner ethnography. By privileging the standpoint and the voice of prisoners as a way of knowing about carceral spaces, we differentiate between the position of researcher-as-facilitator of prisoner ethnography and other approaches to ethnography in prisons. Based on our editorial work with the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons—a peer-reviewed and academically-oriented journal printed by a university press, featuring articles authored or co-authored by current and former prisoners—we discuss the process, possibilities, and constraints of this form of prison research.

As a form of dark tourism or thanatourism (Knudsen 2011) visits to penal history museums have gained popularity in many countries across the world (Ross 2012), including Canada (Walby and Piche 2015a). Contributing to cultural studies literature on museums (e.g. Tan 2012; Newman and McLean 2004) and penal heritage sites (e.g. Welch 2015; Wilson 2008), we examine the role that hauntings and ghosts play at Canadian penal history sites. Gordon (2011: 2) defines hauntings as expressions in which “a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known.” As mediums for hauntings, ghosts captivate believers, as well as sceptics, social theorists, and lay persons (Holloway and Kneale 2008; Gordon 2008; Jones 2001). For example, Jeremy Bentham—the author of infamous ideas for imprisonment including the Panopticon—disbelieved in ghosts, all the while remaining terrified of them.

Execution has been described as the pinnacle of punitiveness, both in centuries past and today as part of the rise of what is called the “punitive turn” (see Carrier 2010 for an overview and critique of the concept). While representations of this malicious practice in popular culture have been the focus of criminological and criminal justice research in the United States (e.g. Lynch 2000, 2002) and elsewhere (Carrabine 2011; Bourgon 2003), little research exists on this phenomenon in Canada. To address this gap in existing literature, we explore representations of executions in penitentiary, prison and jail museums across Canada. Museums are places where the past is depicted, where memories are created, and where culture and history are assembled (Bennett 1997, 2005). The stakes are high with such representations since they can legitimate certain social practices and offer skewed versions of history (Ott et al. 2011).

The advent of a Handbook of Prison Tourism, and one of such depth and scope as this volume, is testimony to the extraordinary rise in scholarly interest in a field that barely a decade ago supported only a handful of researchers. It is testimony too, not only to the global ubiquity of former sites of imprisonment as tourist attractions, but also to the centrality of prisons, and the concept of incarceration as a dominant mode of administering justice that spans cultures and nations. In modern liberal democracies based on and notionally wedded to principles of individual liberty as core legal and societal precepts, it is unsurprising that imprisonment is regarded by many as a fair and just response to individuals’ transgression against society. In an age when many believe in the principle that “the punishment should fit the crime,” the imposition of a prison sentence for a variety of offenses rarely raises questions.

Dark tourism researchers who examine sites of death, suffering, and despair have generated a significant amount of research over the past two decades. Different ways of conducting dark tourism research are emerging. These include studies oriented toward making sense of the supply and demand for such excursions, and research that explores how cultural meanings are negotiated at these destinations. There are also critiques of the wide-ranging application of the dark tourism concept, which has led some scholars to argue that it is analytically imprecise. New directions for future dark tourism research have also been proposed, including a call to shift away from discipline-centered analyses. Engaging with these developments, we suggest that the future direction of dark tourism research should involve grounding such studies in the concerns and insights offered in specific social science disciplines, including criminology and criminal justice studies among others, to add focus and precision to cross-disciplinary debates. To do so we draw from the emergence and development of penal tourism research, which examines how cultural representations of penality shape and are shaped by the practice of punishment in given societies. Since penal tourism research tends to focus on prison museums, we propose future directions for the study of this phenomenon rooted in criminological concerns for understanding how penal meaning making, including definitions of acts that are criminalized and what constitutes (in)justice, takes place in other sites of punishment memorialization including police and courthouse museums. Other future research directions include studying sites that memorialize corporate and state harms.

In previous work (see Piche and Walby) we argued that carceral tours as commonly practised have limited pedagogical and research value, and contribute to the degradation that prisoners experience. Wilson, Spina and Canaan have recently criticised our position on carceral tours. In this rejoinder, we critique the methodological approach and the logic of Wilson and colleagues. We argue that Wilson and colleagues fail to consider how organisational policies and power relations shape carceral encounters. In this way, we reiterate our call for greater reflexivity and critical scrutiny regarding carceral tours.

Among prison scholars it is well known that access to penal institutions for the purposes of conducting research is not a given. For instance, in the Canadian context, some social researchers have been effectively barred from conducting studies inside prisons or have had to modify their research designs in order to enter the carceral. The ability to obtain unpublished records on imprisonment policies and practices in Canada has also been cited as a cumbersome process that often results in non-disclosure of the documents sought.Beyond data collection, social researchers have also raised concerns about the challenges of communicating their findings to publics outside the academy. In criminology, in particular, scholars have been concerned with the perceived lack of influence academic work has had on public policy and public opinion. These interventions, while not novel, have resulted in calls for a public criminology, renewing a discussion on how to disseminate research to non-academic audiences.Although much of the access to information literature is focused on the techniques used to obtain data as well as the barriers encountered during the process, and the public criminology literature is centred principally around the question of how to reach and influence those outside the halls of the university, few have examined how data collection and dissemination activities shape subsequent information flows. Here, I am not referring to the moments when and sites where the “policing of criminological knowledge” occur that mediate access to data sources and diffusion opportunities based on the epistemological orientations and political agendas of gatekeepers.