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4. Prison Tourism: The Cultural Work and Play of Punishment
- NYU Press
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85 4 Prison Tourism The Cultural Work and Play of Punishment Tourism is such a substitute, a substitute satisfaction of a genuine need—that could otherwise prove creative and deeply ethical: The need to top up the proximity of otherness with recognition of shared humanity and enrichment of its contents. —Adrian Franklin, “The Tourist Syndrome: An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman,” 2003 Preserved prisons are stony silent witnesses to the things former regimes were prepared to do to people who violated laws or who seemed threatening or suspicious. The murkiest project of all would be to close them to tourists rather than to confront the ongoing challenge of interpreting incarceration, punishment, and forced isolation. —Carolyn Strange and Michael Kempa, “Shades of Dark Tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island,” 2003 Another cultural arena in which penal spectatorship is achieving new and unprecedented possibility lies in the realm of prison tourism . Across the United States, commercialized tours of defunct prisons are gaining popularity, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually . These sites include such recognizable institutions as Alcatraz and Eastern State Penitentiary, but also a wide range of lesser known former penitentiaries, reformatories, and jails in West Virginia, Ohio, Massachusetts , Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, New Jersey, Hawaii, Indiana , South Carolina, California, Pennsylvania, and beyond. This chapter explores the kind of cultural work that these sites and practices perform, 86 Prison Tourism including the penal discourses and mythologies they invoke, through an examination of the social construction of the prison as tourist site. Based upon an assessment of institutional advertising, Internet descriptions, media representations, interviews, and the experience and design of the tours themselves, I map the manner in which a peculiar kind of penal spectator is produced as new life is given to dead prisons in a society which imprisons on an unprecedented scale. One kind of penitentiary tour in particular has achieved unusual levels of popularity—the overnight prison ghost hunt. Groups arrive late in the evening, are given a quick tour of the premises, with special attention to “haunted” sites—spaces where assaults, murders, and executions occurred. Along the way, some experience the thrill of being locked into cells. Late in the course of one evening tour, huddled in an old gatehouse, the guide begins to describe the place visitors are standing as the former site for the state’s executions. The building now serves as a back entrance to the facility but had been the setting for the hanging scaffold where 85 men were executed when the state still had death penalty statutes in place. The scaffold still exists high in the rafters where inmates were dropped through a trapdoor in the ceiling. As the guide moves toward the completion of his story, he directs everyone’s attention to the still existing trapdoor which suddenly bursts open, with a dummy dropping and then dangling from a noose suspended above the group. Tourists scream, jump, gasp, and then burst into laughter. Everyone is then left alone, locked in with only flashlights and curiosity, allowed complete freedom to roam the dilapidated premises on their own, searching for ghosts, exploring the empty space, and periodically scaring one another. In the early morning hours, tired and cold, participants assemble in the souvenir shop, make their purchases , and begin the long trek home. Across prison tours, day and night, the question of how groups develop at sites of prisons arises. What brings people, children, students, families, the disabled, the elderly, and researchers to the gates of old, dilapidated prisons day and night? How do these sites create constellations of meaning in which education, history, and spectacle merge? And finally, what is to be done with the role of pain in this construction of meaning? Importantly, night tours are organized fundamentally around the idea of prisoners’ past violence, pain, and death—via their ghosts. In general, tours depend in their sociality upon moments in which strangers collectively bond around the replication of the infliction of pain and death. In this way, prison tours produce fascinating spectrums of sociality, built [54.226.25.246] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:40 GMT) Prison Tourism 87 fundamentally around the prison’s past as lived and remembered experience and the spectacle of cruel cultural fantasy. The frames of the tours themselves rarely provide an opportunity to reconcile these tensions in any meaningful way but rather leave participants suspended in the context of vast omissions even as they encourage their audience to participate vicariously in past judgments. The imprisoned voices of...