Prison Museum Research Articles

A Sense of Stalinism

This article compares visitor experiences at the Gulag History Museum in Moscow and the NKVD Prison Museum in Tomsk, Siberia. The museums differ in the production of authenticity in the museum experience. The Moscow museum has no direct relationship to a site of memory and therefore utilizes constructed forms of authenticity. In contrast, the Tomsk museum makes use of objective authenticity given its location in an original prison building. The museums share a stated mission to produce a cosmopolitan mode of remembering based on universal values and empathy for victims with a preventive mission for the sake of the future. The article examines original data from visitor focus groups to understand the emotional impact of these museums. The Moscow museum manufactures the atmosphere of the Gulag through interactive sensory stimulation. We found that this can meet resistance from visitors who sense that their emotions are being manipulated. We found that the Tomsk museum directly elicits strong emotional responses but responses could also include dark tourist titillation. In conclusion, we consider how these findings speak to debates around the tension between cosmopolitan, antagonistic, and agonistic modes of remembering.

Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, edited by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch

Reviewed by: Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual ed. by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch Michael Meranze (bio) Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, edited by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch; pp. xv + 199. London and New York: Routledge, 2021, $160.00, $48.95 paper, $44.05 ebook. The Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 cut a caesura into the history of Britain's penal practices. For centuries hangings had been consistent features of Britain's public space, with the Law's ultimate display designed to clarify before the eyes of the public the penalties that accrued to those who violated its most serious mandates. After the Act, that display would be moved within walls, separated from the crowd that had traditionally been its immediate audience. Although hangings would continue, a new, more intense process of mediation would replace the visceral and visual sight of the body broken on the gallows. Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, edited by Patrick Low, Helen Rutherford, and Clare Sandford-Couch, tackles the implications and effects of this transition. Growing out of a conference held in 2018, Execution Culture is divided into two sections: the first focuses on the act of witnessing the execution and the second on the ways that executions were represented after 1868. The volume also raises a fascinating analytical question: how do you write the history of an absence? This question is partly addressed in James Gregory's treatment of the ways that the Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 was depicted first by contemporaries and later in both popular and scholarly cultures. But it runs throughout the volume as both a methodological and analytical question. The first part of the volume, "Going to see a man hanged," takes up issues that will be most familiar to scholars of punishment. Rachel Bennett (on Scotland) and Matthew White (on London) show the myriad ways that the hanging, as well as fears about the effects of hanging, played across the nineteenth century. They remind the reader that, despite the apparent sameness of executions, they were, in fact, extremely varied in their placement, in the tactics deployed to manage both the condemned and the crowd, in the reactions of crowds, and in the penalties inflicted on the condemned both in life and death. Katherine Ebury (on the effect of the Act on the ways executioners experienced and depicted their task) and Rhiannon Pickin (on contemporary prison museums in the United Kingdom) tackle the problem from a different perspective. Here the question becomes the gap between those who engaged in the execution and wrote about the experience and those who, presented with a virtual experience of seeing an execution, return little marked to their daily lives. In Britain, after all, the death penalty now exists largely in popular culture. Ebury and Pickin's chapters lead nicely into the second part ("One had better narrate the circumstances as they occurred"), which is a series of investigations into the ways that capital punishment has been conceived and represented after it was moved behind prison walls. Samuel Saunders (on the periodical press), Rutherford and Sandford-Couch (on the depiction of a violent offender), and Seth Low (on the initial years of the Capital Punishment Amendment Act) offer careful readings of the ways in which the press framed both the execution and the condemned and of how the Act changed the practices of execution itself. Rutherford and Sandford-Couch in particular draw attention to the fact that, as executions receded from visibility, other spaces (the coroner's court, the criminal trial) [End Page 511] became increasingly important venues to watch the play of justice and the reactions of the condemned. Their readings, combined with Low's analysis of the tensions between local and national authorities, remind us that the elimination of public hanging created new issues even as it purported to solve old ones. Finally, Stephanie Emma Brown (in a study of Wales) demonstrates the complexity of national and racial issues by demonstrating that there was no simple creation of a so-called Other...

Exploring the role of place attachment and prison museum experience on recommending intention and subjective well-being

ABSTRACT The aim of the study is to explore the influence of prison experience and place attachment on recommend intention and subjective well-being in the context of dark tourism. A survey was conducted within the scope of Sinop Historical Prison in Sinop/Turkey. Data were collected from a total of 143 visitors using the convenience sampling technique. The collected data were analysed using Partial Least Square (PLS). According to the findings, prison experience and place attachment have significant effects on recommending intention and subjective well-being. Moreover, the study provides empirical contributions to the literature in terms of measuring the prison museum experience.

Saints and ghosts: nation-building and narratives of punishment in Taiwan’s prison museums

PurposeThis paper explores two museums in Taiwan, both former sites of incarceration, and asks how they reflect Taiwan’s evolving relationship with the past. Taiwan has successfully emerged from its authoritarian past into a democratic present; yet, it still bears the scars of its traumatic and violent history in the places where trauma and pain was exacted over Taiwanese people by different regimes. Two of these places are former prisons, now museums with common histories of incarceration, but very different approaches to presentation of traumatic pasts. This paper aims to understand the selective presentation of narratives of punishment in prison museums in Taiwan and what they reflect about Taiwan’s national identity.Design/methodology/approachThis research used a qualitative ethnographic methodology, approaching prison museums as research sites with multidimensional textual, spatial and visual data. This study used a narrative ethnology approach to analyse the content, structure and social context surrounding the stories told about punishment at the sites.FindingsWhile the Jingmei White Terror Memorial Park documents past abuses under the authoritarian Kuomindang Government (1945–1987), the narratives presented at the Chiayi Prison Museum, constructed under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), ignore past colonial violence. This study argues that the invisibility of past colonial violence in Chiayi prison museum acts to strengthen Taiwan’s multicultural national identity, while Jingmei WTMP acts to valorise political prisoners as heroic fighters for Taiwan’s democracy and human rights.Originality/valueThis research makes a contribution to the museum studies literature through extending understanding of the relationship between former carceral spaces and national identity projects.

Long-Term Memories from Visiting a Prison Museum

This study sought to determine the long-term memories from a visit to Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA. Unstructured phone interviews were conducted with participants two years after their visit. Results suggest that participants could recall both episodic and semantic memories. They recalled a visceral, emotional, and memorable experience. Furthermore, they learned about, reflected upon, and shared knowledge they gained of contemporary and controversial criminal justice issues. The implication of these results is that other prison museums can likely engage visitors in meaningful discussion of contemporary issues.

Heterotopic Heritage in Hong Kong: Tai Kwun and Neo-Victorian Carceral Space

The prison is specifically identified by Michel Foucault in his essay, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), as an exemplar of “heterotopias of deviation”. Reified in neo-Victorian production as a hegemonic space to be resisted, within which illicit desire, feminist politics, and alternate narratives, for example, flourish under harsh panoptic conditions, the prison nonetheless emerges as a counter-site to both nineteenth-century and contemporary social life. This article investigates the neo-Victorian prison museum that embodies several of Foucault’s heterotopic principles and traits from heterochronia to the dynamics of illusion, compensation/exclusion and inclusion that structure the relationship of heterotopic space to all space. Specifically, I explore the heritage site of the Central Police Station compound in Hong Kong, recently transformed into “Tai Kwun: the Centre for Heritage and the Arts”. Tai Kwun (“Big Station” in Cantonese) combines Victorian and contemporary architecture, carceral space, contemporary art, and postcolonial history to herald the transformation of Hong Kong into an international arts hub. Tai Kwun is an impressive example of neo-Victorian adaptive reuse, but its current status as a former prison, art museum, and heritage space complicates the celebratory aspects of heterotopia as counter-site. Instead, Tai Kwun’s spatial, historical, and financial arrangements emphasize the challenges that tourism, government funding, heritage, and the art industry pose for Foucault’s original definition of heterotopia and our conception of the politics of neo-Victorianism in the present.

The Museification of the Former Prisons: International Experience and Russian Reality

This article is dedicated to several modern approaches to the cultural museification process of former prisons. “The fate” of closed and no longer working prisons is the subject of discussion between state authorities, business and civilian population. The result of the prison transformation directly depends on the funding sources. Currently, there are multiple examples of prison buildings being used as cinema settings, social housing, hotels and hostels, and shopping centers. Recently, visiting old prisons has become a popular destination for cultural and educational tourism, so the problem of creating museums on their territory has attracted fixed scientific attention. The research on the museification process of prison facilities involves the study of the processes of repurposing former places of detention; studying the features of excursion organizing and analyzing the impressions of prison museum visitors. This article analyzes and emphasizes Canadian and French cultural experiences of prison museification, including their strategies of museification and tour guides classification. As an example of the implementation of a comprehensive approach to the preservation of liberty deprivation places as the objects of cultural heritage, the French Virtual Museum of Justice, whose exposition is constantly being updated, is considered. Prisons that have been turned into Museums are multi­faceted objects, and the goals of preserving and exploring these heritage sites also vary: from studying architectural specific of the building to perpetuating the memory of the innocent.

Collective memory and the populist cause: The Ulucanlar Prison Museum in Turkey

This article focuses on how political actors appropriate the past by utilizing collective traumas for their populist cause. We demonstrate how the Ulucanlar Prison Museum in Turkey and the oppression of military interventions, for which it served as a backyard, became a tool for the AKP’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-Justice and Development Party) populist agenda. Through a particular narration of history embedded in the museum, the AKP aimed to forge an internal frontier within the society between an envisioned homogenous body of people on the one hand and the elite on the other. Situating itself as the people’s authentic voice against this elite, the AKP tried to further its popular appeal and legitimize its extension of power. What appeared as coming to terms with the past was instead the instrumentalization of the past for a singular political agenda, eager to remove the complexities and pluralism of the past for the sake of telling a politically useful story.

Assessing the Relationship between Promotional Tools and Tourists’ Intention to Visit the National Prison Museum in Melaka

Assessing the Relationship between Promotional Tools and Tourists’ Intention to Visit the National Prison Museum in Melaka

Penitentsiarnye muzei v Sovetskoy Rossii v 1920-e gg.

The paper is devoted to the history of early Soviet prison museums which were opened and operated at research institutes and penitentiaries in the 1920s. It proposes to consider these museums within the context of positivist criminology that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century. The increasing interest in criminal and prison culture motivated scholars and enthusiasts to collect and exhibit objects related to criminals and prisoners. Developing the model of the criminological museum, the Soviet prison museum pursued not only a purely scientific goal but had different functions. By comparing the Soviet penal system to its Tsarist counterpart, prison museums emphasized the revolutionary and emancipatory nature of the former. Representing artifacts (playing cards, tattoos, hand-made prison tools) and the rules of inmate subcultures, museum expositions condemned it as symbols of the old Tsarist prison. The exhibitions with prison factory products (manufactured goods and handicrafts) and samples of inmate initiatives and creativity (newspapers, journals or artwork) had to demonstrate the progressiveness of Soviet penitentiaries, rehabilitating criminals through labor and education. While historians neglected this topic, the article raises questions about the origins and functions of Soviet prison museums for the first time in historiography. The research is based on previously unstudied sources including archival documents, academic publications, museum guides, as well as newspaper and journal articles.

Addressing Contemporary Criminal Justice Issues as Interpretive Outcomes at a Prison Museum

Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site (ESP) is a venue for public education and dialogue on contemporary as well as historical criminal justice issues. Since visitors to prison museums typically have had limited involvement with prisons, the experience they have onsite may impact their perceptions of contemporary criminal justice issues. Therefore, this study examined the influence of the onsite experiences, as well as policy narratives, policy beliefs, and underlying values on interpretive outcomes. Visitors were surveyed at the end of their visit to Eastern State Penitentiary. Multiple regression was conducted to identify which factors predicted interpretive outcomes. Results showed an increased awareness of criminal justice issues, increased empathy and appreciation for those involved in the system, and support for criminal justice reform across ideological boundaries.

Bir Hüzün Turizmi Destinasyonu Olarak Ulucanlar Cezaevi Müzesi Ziyaretçilerinin Elektronik Yorumlarının İçerik Analizi

The purpose of this study is to determine the types of feelings, satisfaction levels and recommendations of the visitors by analyzing the comments of visitors who visit the museum on tripadvisor.com website about the historical Ulucanlar Prison Museum in Ankara. The data of the research was drawn from the TripAdvisor travel site, which constitutes the largest online network of traveling consumers. From September 2013 to July 2019, 317 comments on tripadvisor.com were transferred to Word and subjected to content analysis, one of the qualitative research methods. MAXQDA 18 program was used to analyze the data. In the content analysis of 317 comments, the comments were grouped and coded under 4 main themes: tourist expectation, sensed feeling, advice, and comments. According to the findings of study, the majority of the visitors liked the museum and were satisfied with the visit. They also advise potential visitors who will visit the museum later that the museum should be seen and advice museum management that the physical facilities of the museum should be increased. On the other hand, the emotions that the visitors feel after the visit are mostly impressive, sadness and fear. When all these findings are evaluated, it can be said that Ulucanlar Prison Museum has an important dark tourism potential.

Suffering on Display

British prison museums often over-simplify complex social and cultural issues relating to historical crimes in favour of exhibitions heavily focused on penal reform. This omission of historical facts can affect the interpretation of prisoner experiences. Most studies conducted on prison museums have focused more generally on this issue but have not yet examined specific narratives of the historical prisoners that are presented through costumed interpretation. This article seeks to remedy this via an analysis of problematic interpretations of female prisoners, prison staff, and anachronistic interactions between historic individuals at two museums; The National Justice Museum in Nottingham and York Castle Museum. The article examines how certain characters are portrayed at the sites and how their characterisations depart from the historical record. It argues that the neglect of central historical facts at these sites may severely misrepresent historical individuals and their cases.

Dark Tourism, Emotions, and Postexperience Visitor Effects in a Sensitive Geopolitical Context: A Chinese Case Study

Engaging the neglected intersection between dark tourism, the visitor postexperience and geopolitics, this research reports the findings from a survey of 1,082 domestic visitors to Lushun Prison Museum in Dalian, China, a Japanese-era incarceration and punishment site that projects hegemonic anti-Japanese social representations. Most respondents reported strong emotional reactions and elevated patriotism along with worsened attitudes toward Japan, Japanese products and, to a lesser degree, Japanese people, suggesting negative implications for the increasingly tense China–Japan bilateral relationship. However, sample diversity is indicated by the revelation of small Japan-neutral clusters whose members are more likely to express contemplation and pity as dominant emotions rather than the anger and hate of the majority, and who qualify the dominant social representations accordingly. Communist Party membership, age, lack of student affiliation, and not having Japanese friends or knowing any Japanese people were all associated with Japan-negative perceptions and intentions.

Convicts and conservation: inmate labor, fires and forestry in southernmost Argentina

The modern penitentiary was rarely a fully closed, insular, or placeless institution. Approaching penology as environmental history can therefore restore connections that have been severed between prison studies, political ecology, and geography. This article uses the Ushuaia penal colony/penitentiary, located in southernmost Argentina, to explore relationships between penology, inmate labor, and forestry. In the early 1900s, inmates erected the prison that would house them, and labored to provide roads, government buildings, and electricity for Ushuaia. Their main activity was felling timber, which brought together the prison and forestry departments, thus linking discipline with deforestation, and blurring the lines between the interior and exterior of the penitentiary. After decades of extensive forest fires, the lack of a self-sustaining economy, and charges of inmate abuse, the prison was closed in 1947. A subsequent campaign to salvage the region by supplanting ominous images of a natural prison with those of a beautiful landscape resulted in the establishment of a national park in 1960. And, in 1997, fifty years after its closure, the defunct prison was converted to a museum. The national park and prison museum now attract thousands of tourists annually, offering two competing — rather than co-constitutive — versions of national history. This juxtaposition of green and dark tourism is not unique to Ushuaia, and thus highlights tensions inherent to when and where sites of punishment, conservation, and memory overlap.

Understanding the motivations and emotions of visitors at Tuol Sleng Genocide Prison Museum (S-21) in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the motives and emotions of Western tourists visiting Tuol Sleng Genocide Prison Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and further contribute to a deeper understanding of the dark tourism consumption. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from popular travel blog sites. This study employs various qualitative and quantitative methods, such as netnography, semantic network analysis and critical content analysis in order to gain a deeper insight into the visitors’ emotions and motivations. Findings This study reveals that people visit Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum mainly for “remembrance”, “worth visiting”, “learning and understanding”, “paying respect” and a “must visit” attraction. Emotions revealed in this study were “shocking“, “sadness“, “horror” and “depressive”. Research limitations/implications This paper is limited to the analyses of travel blogs sites. Further research could include interviews with Western visitors, and professionals managing the site. Originality/value To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study to examine the emotions of visitors in Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

Prison Public Memory in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Prison Public Memory in the Era of Mass Incarceration Liz Ševčenko (bio) Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape. Edited by Brigitte Sion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 356 pages. $35.00 (paper). Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment. By Michael Welch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. 304 pages. $70.00 (cloth). $34.95 (paper). “It is estimated that one in ten Australians has a convict ancestor,” reads a panel at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney reassuringly. The government-run museum encourages visitors to embrace incarceration as part of a shared national heritage, suggesting, “Ask someone in your family if you have a convict ancestor.”1 In the United States, as many as one in three people have been arrested; that means tens of millions have friends or family members who have.2 And if you count ancestors? Americans laugh at one in ten. While the carceral state is deeply divided by race, at this point, almost no one lives outside it. Yet imagine the American analogue to Australia’s Historic Houses Trust, the US National Park Service, posing that question at Alcatraz. Where prison museums in other parts of the world are opening to critique penal systems and humanize those affected by them, Mary Rachel Gould argues that “the prison-turned-tourist attraction makes a contribution to the silent acceptance of mass incarceration in the U.S.” (Sion 268). In her excellent essay on Alcatraz in Brigitte Sion’s Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, Gould notes that the island prison was opened as a museum in 1972, the dawn of the era of mass incarceration. This coincidence supports Michelle Brown’s argument that “dead prisons reconfigure living prisons, not in a clear chain of direct institutional transformation but in a larger cultural imaginary.”3 As we teeter on the apex of this era of incarceration, it is time to find the connections between the public memories and public policies that have sustained it. A vast number of “death tourism” sites, defined as visits to [End Page 823] sites of violent death, are former prisons and sites of detention, from Alcatraz to Auschwitz. Sion’s brilliant collection moves beyond the eye rolls and snide commentary that dominate many descriptions of such sites, which often stop with pointing out the many obvious ironies produced when trauma and tourism are combined. Instead, Sion’s authors start by taking these sites seriously—their political economy, the contesting constituencies behind their development, and the varied experiences of their visitors. In this way, the collection powerfully demonstrates that death tourism “is complex and deserves serious and thorough scholarship” (6). Michael Welch’s Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment brings a criminologist’s focus to prison museums and the roles they play in constructing cultural understandings of crime and punishment. Sion’s scholars, paired with Welch’s criminological perspectives, provide new tools to explore the interplay of public memory and public policy, and imagine alternatives. Literature on the popular creation, representation, and dissemination of history and memory has emerged from wildly dispersed locations, including public history (a largely US concern born from social history movements of the 1960s and 1970s), museum studies (emerging from art history and anthropology), transitional justice (a field of international law concerned with how states confront past crimes as part of transitioning to democracy), hospitality and tourism (concerned with marketing and management), and even some neuroscience (seeking to understand impact by studying visitors’ brain patterns). The works reviewed here further diversify the existing literature’s methodological approaches. The scholars in Sion’s collection are concerned with culture, but from a variety of perspectives: performance studies, drama, visual studies, anthropology, and other fields. Welch, on the other hand, is a criminologist who has written extensively on the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States. Whatever their disparate points of entry, both collections ground themselves in a common concept: dark tourism. Popularized by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, who are credited with coining the term in 1996, the idea has become a generative framework for a whole generation of travel writing, tourism and cultural studies, an...

Show me the prison! The development of prison tourism in the UK

This paper presents an analysis of the historical development and interpretation of prison tourism in the UK Britain and the influence of this on current representations of prison museums via prison museum websites. While there has been significant examination of various prison museums overseas there has been comparatively little published on these institutions in the UK Britain. In response to contending pressures, prison museums have endeavoured to present a balanced and objective depiction of past prison systems whilst their promotional websites, which serve to draw in customers, frequently rely on ‘popular’ depictions. These representations raise important questions as prisons cannot be seen as neutral or apolitical, neither those in the early 21st century nor those of the past. Despite these pressures, prison museums have great potential to increase public understanding of the prison; this paper promotes a more ethical, multi-perspective and politically diverse interpretation within prison museums.

Unlocking carceral atmospheres: designing visual/material encounters at the prison museum

Using a variety of devices from visual displays, material objects, sensory engagements and embodied performance, museums select and narrate particular moments in history to an increasingly active audience. Thus far, focus on specific elements of museum design has eluded the altogether more pervasive, intangible and complex sensations designed, engineered, co-constituted and also arising unexpectedly from these sites: atmospheres. This article draws upon a particular museum experience – that of the prison museum – to interrogate how atmospheres are a key component of re-telling the past. Here, the authors explore the production and consumption of what they term ‘carceral atmospheres’. Focusing on two prison museums, the article explores how visitors unlock experiences of incarceration via the variety of atmospheric sensations calculated and provoked in these museum settings through visual/material manifestations and cues. The authors conclude that understanding atmospheric design is vital to gaining a deeper appreciation of how heritage sites function in the 21st century.

Museum and Exhibit Review: Lonts’koho Street Prison Museum, L’viv, Ukraine

Museum and Exhibit Review: Lonts’koho Street Prison Museum, L’viv, Ukraine