The polysemy of punishment memorialization: Dark tourism and Ontario's penal history museums
| Author | Kevin Walby,Justin Piché |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474511414784 |
| Date | 01 October 2011 |
| Published date | 01 October 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Punishment & Society
13(4) 451–472
!The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474511414784
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Article
The polysemy
of punishment
memorialization: Dark
tourism and Ontario’s
penal history museums
Kevin Walby
University of Victoria, Canada
Justin Piche
´
Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Abstract
Contributing to debates about cultural representations of prisons and prisoners, as well
as exploring the crossover between the dark tourism literature and cultural criminol-
ogy, this article reflects on how penal museums in the province of Ontario, Canada,
create and communicate meaning as it regards imprisonment and punishment. Drawing
from field notes made after observations at penal museums located in central and
eastern Ontario cities and towns, we contend that penal museum relics offer a poly-
semy of meaning to viewers, as critical, indifferent and punitive interpretations are
possible. Based on analysis of tour guide narratives as well as penal relics, we explore
how the process of memorialization in many of these museums is organized around the
idea of penal reform, which positions imprisonment and punishment as remnants of the
past and introduces a social distance between the punished and the penal spectator.
Keywords
dark tourism, imprisonment, museums, penal reform, punishment
Go to a jail in Ontario today, and you are likely to leave as easily as you entered,
voluntarily and with a smile. The reason is simple – most of the early lock-ups in
this province are no longer used for incarceration. Rather, where there were cells
Corresponding author:
Kevin Walby, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, PO Box 3050, STN CSC, Victoria, BC, V8W
3P5, Canada.
Email: kwalby@uvic.ca
that once held hardened thieves, hookers, or just the itinerant or the insane, there
are now books, or filing cabinets, or desks. (R. Brown, 2006: x)
Introduction
Visiting a decommissioned prison or jail turned museum is now a common form of
tourism and leisure. Penal museums are popular tourist stops the world over, from
The Clink in London (England), to the NS Dokumentationiszentrum in Ko
¨lm
(Germany), the Celica hostel in Ljubljana (Slovenia), Alcatraz in San Francisco
(United States), Robben Island near Cape Town (South Africa), Freemantle Prison
(Australia) and many more.
Penal museums in the province of Ontario, Canada, consist of 15 sites housed in
closed county gaols, four former local lock-ups, as well as the former house of the
warden of Kingston Penitentiary.
1
We have conducted observations at Ontario
penal museums located in central and eastern Ontario cities and towns, including
sites in Beaverton, Cobourg, Cornwall, Creemore, Kingston and Ottawa.
In contributing to debates as it regards ‘dark tourism’ (see Lennon and Foley,
2000; Miles, 2002; Shackley, 2001; Stone and Sharpley, 2008) as well as what
Strange and Kempa (2003) have referred to as ‘penal tourism’, this article reflects
on how such cultural sites communicate meaning concerning imprisonment and
punishment. The ‘dark tourism’ concept refers to museum representations of death,
disaster or atrocity for pedagogical and commercial purposes. The reasons why
tourists visit dark tourism sites like former prisons are varied. Some visit out of
curiosity, others visit to remember loved ones. Because of the historical revisionism
they necessarily engage in, dark tourism sites are also subject to contested inter-
pretations (Wilson, 2008a). Thus, a dark tourism site that is ‘re-ordered as monu-
ment-museum, cannot do any more than stand for the events which it represents...
and as such tends towards replacing or displacing them’ (Keil, 2005: 485). Penal
museums likewise erase as much as they reveal.
M. Brown (2009) argues that most people discern what they know about impris-
onment and punishment through cultural representations. Penal museums are one
form of commodification and consumption of representations of prisons and pris-
oners, which includes movies and television shows (see Eigenberg and Baro, 2003;
Nellis, 2009), videos streamed from inside operational penal institutions (see
Lynch, 2004) and a range of purchasable items such as toys (see Novek, 2009).
According to M. Brown (2009: 9), such cultural representations introduce a social
distance between the punished and the individual, which produces the ‘penal spec-
tator’ whose ‘imagining of punishment is haunted by abstract potentialities of
danger and insecurity’. This article explores the polysemic meanings conveyed by
penal museum relics and also how penal museums position aspects of punishment
and imprisonment as part of the past. We focus on the representations of impris-
onment and punishment found in penal museums, and how these foster certain
prominent cultural narratives pertaining to prisons and prisoners.
452 Punishment & Society 13(4)
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