Prison Tours Research Articles

The Prison Tour Pedagogy: Getting It Right

Prison tours are a popular tool for teaching about the realities of prison. The limitation of most “prison tours,” and hence, of most evaluations of them, is that they involve a single tour of a single prison by a single group. A better strategy—and test of its impact—would be to incorporate multiple institutions representing a broad range of prisons and prison features. The author created a unique and extensive prison-touring program. Over 33 years, he escorted nearly 3,000 students on 113 weeklong excursions, with each trip including detailed visits to eight to ten very different institutions. Surveys were administered to all 99 student participants before and after their participation in one of four weeklong excursions conducted during an entire academic year. The impact of the experience on student attitudes about convicts, staff, prison, justice policies, and reform was positive, dramatic, and enduring. (The full one-hour documentary about this program, Prison Through Tomorrow’s Eyes , can be screened online at https://vimeo.com/92949779.)

“This is Part of my Final Grade”: A LatCrit Critique of Prison Tours as Pedagogical Tools in Criminal Justice Education

The proliferation of criminal justice programs brings new pedagogical challenges for educators who look for innovative ways to help students build lasting connections between theory, research, and practice. Prison tours are a well-known experiential learning practice in criminal justice courses. Educators have emphasized the benefits of using prison tours in providing students with first-hand knowledge of the criminal justice system, but critics have questioned their educational value, and the subjectivity of students’ personal experiences are rarely considered. In this article, I use LatCrit to problematize the use of prison tours as pedagogical tools in criminal justice courses, focusing on my status as a Latinx scholar and educator. I combine counter-story telling and autoethnography to highlight my own prison tour experience. I question the educational benefits of prison tours and discuss the potential harms they can cause Latinx students who have previously come into contact with the criminal justice system.

Inmate Attitudes about Prison Tours for Students

Correctional facility tours are common within criminal justice programs as a way for students to experience real-world criminal justice. While tours have received praise for solidifying learning, they have also been criticized for objectification of inmates. In this research, individuals who were incarcerated in a Midwestern state were surveyed about their attitudes toward students touring prisons. While participants, in general, viewed tours favorably, one theme underscored the need to include the voices of incarcerees in the schedule of prison tours.

The Impact of Correctional Facility Tours on Student Perceptions and Realizations of the Correctional Environment: A Research Note

Jail and prison tours have become an important educational tool in many criminal justice programs. This study uses an inductive approach to explore student perceptions of the physical and social environment of jails and prisons following tours of correctional facilities. The study draws from Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) which supports the focus on student reflections following experiential learning activities. Eighty essays were analyzed. Three broad themes emerged: the physical environment and social atmosphere of the correctional facilities, incarcerated people and their activities, and student realizations about correctional facilities. The study’s findings suggest that correctional tours provide opportunities for students to realize that many of the beliefs held about jails, prisons, and incarcerated individuals prior to exposure to the correctional environment were false. Considering the need in society for defying the stigma attached to offenders, correctional tours stand out as relevant – and essential – academic tools.

New Opportunities or Closing Doors? How Correctional Facility Tours Impact Students’ Thoughts about Correctional Careers

Children may say they want to grow up to be a police officer, but we typically do not hear children saying they want to work in a prison or jail when they grow up. Given negative media attention of correctional facilities, it may not be surprising that many students enter criminal justice programs uninterested in correctional careers. Correctional facility tours can be useful for exposing criminal justice students to careers they may not have previously considered or ones about which they held negative stereotypes. Drawing on the premises of Experiential Learning Theory and using student essays, we address the following research questions: (1) Does attending a jail or prison tour influence how students think of correctional officers and correctional careers? (2) What perceptions do students have of correctional officers prior to attending a jail or prison tour and what do students think of correctional officers after the tour?

Exploring the impact of correctional facility tours on the perceptions of undergraduate criminal justice students

Students’ negative perceptions of inmates are a challenging aspect of teaching criminal justice. Scholars suggest exposing students to the criminal justice system may provide a realistic approach to understanding offenders. Prison tours have become a viable solution for instructors who want to create such exposure, but contrasting perspectives on the impact of prison tours on students’ learning are present in research. Drawing upon theories of experiential learning, we designed a pre-/post-survey to address the following exploratory questions: (1) What perceptions do criminal justice students hold regarding corrections, inmates, and correctional officers? (2) Do these perceptions change after going on a tour of a correctional facility? Data were collected from a convenience sample of 123 students attending courses at two Midwestern universities. Findings add to the body of literature on prison tours as a component of criminal justice education and further our understanding of the complexity of student learning.

Going to Prison: The Effect of a Prison Tour on Students’ Attitudes Toward Punitiveness

The pedagogical approaches of a criminal justice education affect the attitudes and perceptions of those most likely to develop and administer criminal justice policies in the future. This study examines the effect of a prison tour on students’ understanding of prison and attitudes about punishment. Undergraduate criminal justice students were given a survey to assess their attitudes about prisons, prisoners, and alternative sanctions before and after a field trip to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Post-survey responses showed changes in students’ perceptions regarding punitiveness, prisons, prisoners, and rehabilitation. We discuss this finding within the framework of the contact hypothesis, and we recommend including this type of first-hand exposure as part of a criminal justice curriculum.

Going to Prison: The Effect of a Prison Tour on Students' Attitudes Toward Punitiveness

The pedagogical approaches of a criminal justice education affect the attitudes and perceptions of those most likely to develop and administer criminal justice policies in the future. This study examines the effect of a prison tour on students’ understanding of prison and attitudes about punishment. Undergraduate criminal justice students were given a survey to assess their attitudes about prisons, prisoners, and alternative sanctions before and after a field trip to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Post-survey responses showed changes in students’ perceptions regarding punitiveness, prisons, prisoners, and rehabilitation. We discuss this finding within the framework of the contact hypothesis, and we recommend including this type of first-hand exposure as part of a criminal justice curriculum.

Other neoliberal penalities: Marching Powder and prison tourism in La Paz

For Loïc Wacquant ‘neoliberal penality’ is epitomized by the ‘penal state’ in the USA. As a decentring of this assumption, this article examines the 2003 ‘cult’ memoir Marching Powder, Rusty Young and Thomas Mcfadden’s account of the five years that Mcfadden, a British cocaine smuggler, spent in San Pedro prison La Paz in the late 1990s, where he became famous for organizing ‘prison tours’ for foreign backpackers. Marching Powder offers a vision of the extreme end of neoliberal penal logic whereby Bolivia displaces the USA as the site of a possible neoliberal ‘extreme’ as San Pedro becomes a synecdoche for an alternative neoliberal penal order. Drawing on debates from critical criminology and tourism studies, I suggest that as the correlate of the prison tours which it continues to promote, Marching Powder feeds the touristic desire for the spectacle of punishment.

Democracy and Unfreedom: Revisiting Tocqueville and Beaumont in America

This essay reexamines the famous 1831 prison tours of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. It reads the three texts that emerged from their collective research practice as a trilogy, one conventionally read in different disciplinary homes ( Democracy in America in political science, On the Penitentiary in criminology, and Marie, Or Slavery: A Novel of Jacksonian America in literature). I argue that in marginalizing the trilogy’s important critique of slavery and punishment, scholars have overemphasized the centrality of free institutions and ignored the unfree institutions that also anchor American political life. The article urges scholars in political theory and political science to attend to this formative moment in mass incarceration and carceral democracy.

Student Perceptions of Juvenile Offender Accounts in Criminal Justice Education

In criminal justice programs, a major teaching objective is to expose students to the wide range of experiences and career paths available in criminal justice. Technological advances increase instructional strategies so that students may gain more realistic educational experience and correct erroneous perceptions about the criminal justice system. This paper describes one such strategy for online criminal justice students, a virtual prison tour, founded on the principles of social learning, experiential learning, and e-learning. In an upperclass course in juvenile delinquency, 43 students viewed a video of incarcerated juvenile offenders recounting their experiences of institutionalization, sentences, challenges, programming, and fears upon release. Student responses to seven quantitative questions and one qualitative question revealed that the video greatly impacted their attitudes, understanding, and perceptions of the juvenile justice system and provided pedagogical benefits. This strategy can be used to help criminal justice educators enhance student learning so that students experience a major aspect of the juvenile justice system.

Reinforcing Experiential Learning in Criminology: Definitions, Rationales, and Missed Opportunities Concerning Prison Tours in the United States

Carceral tours remain a controversial aspect of pedagogy and curricula in criminology and criminal justice. In recent years, critics have questioned the pedagogical and ethical validity of conducting prison tours. In response, we clarify definitional ambiguities and provided a rationale for carceral tours that occur within the United States. Here, pedagogical justification for prison tours is based on the work of Lev Vygotsky which is subsumed under the broader paradigm of experiential education. Criticisms leveled at prison tours are described as missed opportunities; with experiential learning examined in terms of the epistemology of criminological expertise, the concept of impression management (i.e. Goffman), and the notion of the penal gaze. The efficacy of pedagogical tours is discussed with reference to the role of active and innovative teaching methods in criminology and criminal justice.

The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle. By Michelle Brown. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 249 pp. $24.00 paper.

The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle. By Michelle Brown. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 249 pp. $24.00 paper. Michelle Brown's The Culture of Punishment is a systematic analysis of more visible ways public imagines what goes on behind our nation's prison walls. Nowhere else is reader able to encounter in one text a convincing thematic survey of spectacularized representation of prisonerFacross films and televisual programs; advertisements for historical prison tours, ghost hunts, and other adventure entertainment; official statements and print media representations of wartime prison-building and torture; and both specialized and popularized commentary on various late twentieth-century debates within criminology about effectiveness of punishment. And because of how this expansive archive is mappedFstarting with more popular and ending with more technicalFit is easy to envision how The Culture of Punishment might play important role in undergraduate education of connecting everyday of college student life to oftentimes separated, but nonetheless urgent, demands of social justice. According to Brown, culture of comprises four major visual media: mass media, commercial prison tourism, war discourse, and social scientific knowledge. Each medium contributes to generating what Brown calls the penal (pp. 8-12), respectively, through production of iconic images of prisoners, deadened buildings of history of punishment, extralegal proliferation of global prison, and overvaluation of expert knowledge about whether and how reduces crime. This penal spectator's gaze, distanced as it is from actual interaction with men and women living in prison, is unable to grasp reality of human suffering that prisons produce and, presumably because of this lapse, tacitly becomes part of larger disciplinary gaze of prison regime. And while Brown's mapping of gaze's passivity toward this disciplinary society charts quite a dismal picture, The Culture of Punishment argues that it is precisely through these various media that there is also possibility for penal spectator to engage more activelyFfrom consuming to witnessing (p. 204) other people's pain and exclusion. Thus, in her final chapter, Brown summarizes her overarching argument that cultural analysis has a role in transformation of passivity of penal spectatorship to an informed and engaged mode of citizenship, which requires a critical engagement with work of punishment (p. 191). A special indeed, but what exactly is this role, and its relationship to politics and social change? How precisely can one hope for analyses to shift penal spectator's gaze from consuming to witnessing, from voyeuristic pleasure to critical engagement, through what Brown generally calls cultural work of punishment (p. …

Prison Tours as a Research Tool in the Golden Gulag

Prison Tours as a Research Tool in the Golden Gulag

The Utility of the Correctional Tour: Student Perceptions and the Propensity for Academic Growth

The utility of taking students on tours of correctional facilities remains an unexplored topic within criminal justice. Yet, there is ample justification for reinforcing the pedagogical link between theory and practice through direct observation of criminal justice processes. This becomes particularly salient in the area of corrections, a highly isolated, self‐sustaining, and misunderstood criminal justice system. In this study, 69 students attending criminal justice classes were asked to complete pre‐visit and post‐visit questionnaires associated with tours of correctional institutions. Key themes of the study include students' perceptions of institutional punishment philosophy, and student perceptions of select facility and offender characteristics. Almost 86% of students changed their views in some manner, with a significant portion of students identifying rehabilitation and incapacitation as key philosophies following a prison tour. Stereotypes of prisoners and correctional settings were frequently based on media representations and changed following exposure to the prison tour. These findings are presented with pedagogical implications.

Teaching a course on prisons: A design, some resources, and a little advice*

We discuss our experience teaching undergraduate students about prisons. First, we describe the design of a course, including course goals, course content and some assignments. Then, we share the intellectual and logistical hurdles we have experienced and offer advice on how to overcome them for those planning to teach a seminar on prisons. Included is specific advice on how to successfully integrate prison tours as an experiential learning tool.

PROTOCOL: “Scared Straight” and other prison tour programs for preventing juvenile delinquency

PROTOCOL: “Scared Straight” and other prison tour programs for preventing juvenile delinquency

Jeremy Bentham and Enoch Wines Discuss the Privatization of Corrections

Editor's note: Jeremy Bentham wrote the letters which constitute the Panopticon Papers while in Russia in 1787. The penitentiary model described in these letters provided the basis of a proposal for which he vigorously lobbied in England. He committed significant amounts of his own effort and money to the panopticon plan, although ultimately without success in his native country. The material reproduced below comes from letters 9, 10, and 12, and addresses a number of issues that are at the heart of the modern privatization debate. Enoch Wines was appointed secretary of the New York Prison Associa tion in 1862. Although initially not as experienced as many of his co-workers in the Association, he soon became an important figure in American penal reform. His national prison tour with Theodore Dwight in the 1860s produced the most important correctional assessment since John Howard's E uropean survey in the 1770s. The observations included in this article thus derived from his wide-ranging examination of the nation's prison system.