Erin E. Lynch
Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Analysis Programme, Concordia University
April 15, 2020
“There was a fascination in the spot,” Mark Twain wrote of the mystery of the Chateau d’If, the island prison for political captives that was the setting for Alexandre Dumas’ slow-simmering revenge plot in The Count of Monte Cristo. Twain hired a sailboat for a private tour of the island in 1867 (decades before it was officially opened to the public), a voyage chronicled in his travelogue, The Innocents Abroad:
Its dungeon walls are scarred with the rudely carved names of many and many a captive who fretted his life away here … How thick the names were! And their long-departed owners seemed to throng the gloomy cells and corridors with their phantom shapes…. They could suffer solitude, inactivity, and the horrors of silence that no sound ever disturbed, but they could not bear the thought of being utterly forgotten by the world. (Twain, 1869)
The concept of a prison as a destination for tourists is not a new one – what Michael Welch (2015) calls the “pull of punishment” which these sites exude has been long noted (see also Brown, 2009). What has changed is the sheer ubiquity of these sites open for the public – driven in part by the aging infrastructure of old jails (many now designated heritage sites) combined with the drive toward the centralization of prisons which has left many smaller and rural jails vacant (Walby & Piché, 2015a). Newer still, the trend towards the adaptive reuse of jails as hostels (Hardin, Bay & Amer, 2004) has increasingly meant that the experience of “spending a night in jail” is being marketed as a tourist attraction. More and more, experiencing the carceral is sold as a form of entertainment – where tourists pay for the pleasure of spending time in authentic sites of punishment.
On the one hand, jail hostels take the sparse aesthetics of a hostel budget (where bunk beds, thin mattresses and institutional furnishings are not exactly unexpected) and spin them as part of a themed space. Indeed, scan the online reviews for a jail hostel and you will find everything from cramped windowless rooms to drafty, echoing cellblocks brushed off as “all part of the experience.” On the other hand, they frequently position the experience of sleeping in backpacker accommodation as comparable to spending a night in jail.
Take for example, Ottawa’s Carleton County Gaol, now the HI Ottawa Jail Hostel, where visitors can sleep in lightly refurbished jail cells and are offered tours of the (supposedly haunted) prison. The tour includes a visit to the jail’s gallows, which were intentionally located on the second story so that executions were broadly visible to the public – and the doors of which are still a notable feature of the jail-turned-hostel’s exterior. (Having taken a tour of the jail for a class assignment in my early university years, I never failed to find the looming presence of these doors unsettling, situated as they are right next to a downtown shopping mall). On the hostel’s website, it advertises itself to potential visitors like so: “Ever spent a night in jail? This hostel is inside a 150-year-old former jail, and some say it’s haunted. Hunker down among stone walls and iron doors or even sleep in your own solitary confinement cell. You’re free to leave when you want….” (HI Ottawa Jail Hostel, n.d.).
Notably, the expectation of a restful stay is not really on the menu. Between the jangle of keys in original 1800s cell doors to drum-ceilinged hallways that were uniquely designed to carry sound (as a form of prisoner surveillance), there are plenty of audible ghosts of the hostel’s carceral past – and not the kind that go bump in the night. As one tourist put it, “So this may seem obvious but don’t stay here if you expect a great night’s sleep…the old doors make so much noise and everything in the corridor echoes… for me though, that added to the awesome authentic feel that the hostel had” (user kieran-jeary1245 on “HI Ottawa Jail Hostel,” Hostelworld, 2020). There is a prized novelty in these sensations for the tourist that would likely have worn thin for their original audience.
Figure 1 A glimpse at the “authentic jail cell experience” on offer at HI Ottawa Jail Hostel. Photo credit: Tom Smith/HI Canada (https://hihostels.ca/en/magazine/properties-you-wont-believe-are-hostels)
However, the discomforts of a jail cell are not only an experience offered to the budget traveller; subjecting yourself to (a pale facsimile) of the pains of imprisonment will sometimes cost you:
The latest entry into this unusual niche market is Schloss Hoheneck, the former Stasi (secret police) detention center in what used to be East Germany, which opened in August. The owner intends to retain its prison aura as a “theme”; so, for anyone seeking an off-the-wall incentive, the Schloss promises to treat guests like enemies of the state, with all the bells and whistles–prison food, hard cots with lumpy mattresses, dim light–for $118 a night. (Hardin, Bay & Amer, 2004)
So what is that fascination which Twain identified, which might entice a visitor to pay for an “authentic” prison experience? Curiously, prisons seem to make natural (if dark) tourist attractions – they often feature imposing heritage architecture, a glimpse at a way of life that is not widely accessible, and are imbued with an aura of authenticity by virtue of the authority their buildings convey (Brown, 2009; Welch, 2015). Welch (2015) describes prison architecture – particularly the older styles that are now designated heritage sites – as a kind of “architecture parlante” or “speaking architecture” (108). These buildings tell their own stories by design; they were meant to serve as visible deterrents to criminality and as ironclad symbols of the power of the law. Their allure as tourist attractions may also reflect the fact that prison walls marked a clear boundary between an “inside” and an “outside” (Jewkes, 2016) – and that boundary can now be transgressed. Moreover, from a purely touristic perspective, these buildings often look like heritage – and thus like an appropriate site for tourism (see Figure 2).
Figure 2 Architecture parlante – A tourist poses for a photo in front of the Kingston Penitentiary. Photo credit: Eliot Ferguson for The Whig Standard (https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/kingston-to-seek-deal-to-continue-pen-tours-in-2020)
Penal architecture was designed to be communicative in a number of ways. Whether it aimed to provide a panoptic view for guards or to offer a “light at the end of the tunnel” for the reformed (Welch, 2015: 128-132), the architecture of the prison often attempted to discipline the body through the gaze (Foucault, 1979). The peculiar architecture of the Carleton County Gaol demonstrates how prisons were also designed to allow auditory surveillance (conveying even the sound of a whisper), and the horrors of silence described by Twain in the Chateau d’If are not simply an artful turn of phrase – forced monastic silence was a trademark “reformatory” technique of the early penitentiary (Welch, 2015; Walfish, 2019). The sensations of being in prison – the often quite literal “pains of imprisonment” – were frequently the subject of careful design. Prison museums have increasingly offered visitors ways of tapping into that unique sensory experience (without truly risking liberty or limb, of course).
Not unlike guests in prison hostels, visitors to prison museums might be invited to try some of these pains of imprisonment on for size. The Clink Museum in London, for example, allows some limited hands-on experiences of torture instruments – holding a spiked lead collar or stepping into a metal boot that was used to crush prisoners’ feet – and invites the visitor to imagine what these grisly tools would have felt like applied to their own body (Welch, 2015: 16). Visitors to the Kingston Penitentiary often remark that the tour lets them “get a taste” of what prison was like (“Kingston Penitentiary Tours,” TripAdvisor, 2020) but some prisons tours – like the Old Prison in Trois-Rivières, Quebec – take that more literally, offering tourists who opt for the lockup experience a tin cup of oatmeal as their morning meal after a night in jail (Walby & Piché, 2015b).
The way prison tours are framed – and their manner of delivery – can have a major impact on the meanings they assign to these sites. For example, tours led by local historians tend to impress upon visitors the gravity of the situation, while those that lean more towards entertainment or dramatic re-enactment tend to make light of the past for the sake of offering a fun experience (Ferguson, Walby & Piché, 2016). Whose story gets told also matters. The Kingston Penitentiary tour is partly narrated by ex-employees, which can skew the narrative of the place in the guards’ favour (as some visitors have noted), and tends to amplify salacious stories about inmates, focusing on jail riots and prisoner violence while downplaying the infamously poor conditions of the prison which led to its closure (Walby and Piché, 2015a; see also TripAdvisor “Kingston Penitentiary Tours,” 2020). These narratives can also have the effect of falsely confining imprisonment to a relic of the past (Walby & Piché, 2015a).
As Brown (2009) notes, prison tours tend towards “penal progressivism” – when they do amplify the historical horror of imprisonment, it is as though to declare “look how far we’ve come in our delivery of pain.” Take, as a prime example, the Kingston Penitentiary display which uses a mannequin to help visitors imagine how cramped the old quarters were when compared to a mock-up of a modern Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) jail cell (Walby & Piché, 2015b: 241). And yet, this glimpse into our carceral past is only made possible by the pains of the present – the decommissioning of many of the CSC’s smaller and rural prisons (that led to their subsequent boom as heritage tourist attractions) was spurred by the consolidation of prisoners into larger institutions (a move driven at least in part by economics, and which has amplified the social isolation of many prisoners) (Walby & Piché, 2015a: 498).
There are reminders of the continuity of punishment, however. The (modern-looking) suicide grates on the stairwells of the Carleton County Gaol are a jarring reminder that the practice of imprisonment – and deplorable conditions here – continued well into the modern (the Gaol was not decommissioned until 1972) (Leslie, 2016). Visitors who went on tours of the Kingston Penitentiary shortly after it opened remarked that the stench of punishment had not yet dissipated. One tourist (Caroline B) remarked in 2016 that “Even three years after it closed, you can still ‘smell’ the prison (especially in the cells) – it stinks of fear, sweat, and desperation. You can only imagine what it must have been like to have been locked up in there” (“Kingston Penitentiary Tours,” TripAdvisor, 2020).
No matter how prison tours or jail hostels aim to recreate the genuine article, the touristic experience of the carceral has experiential distance from its real world counterpart (Walby & Piché, 2015b: 238; see also Brown, 2009; Welch, 2015) – the most obvious facet of which is spelled out on the Ottawa Jail Hostel’s website: “You’re free to leave when you want” (“HI Ottawa Jail Hostel,” n.d.). Rather than confront this experiential gap, some sites choose to simply glaze over the problematic associations of the prison (all while trading on its novelty). Christchurch’s Jailhouse Accommodation hostel, for example, proudly touts its history as “Accommodating people for over 140 years!” (Jailhouse Accommodation, n.d.). The experience of being “accommodated” within these walls in the present is thus collapsed with the experiences of past (decidedly less willing) occupants. Other historic jailhouses, like the Napier Prison, have effectively transitioned into entertainment venues In addition to guided tours, the Napier Prison offers guests an optional escape room experience – including one “Treatment Room” where would-be-escapees are bound in handcuffs and blindfolded, all as part of a game (Napier Prison Tours, n.d.). And, of course, what is the experience of spending a night in jail without a photo to show for it? Both the Napier Prison and Jailhouse Accommodation offer guests the opportunity to pose for “mugshot” photos, complete with props. The caption to one such photo declares its subject “Guilty of having a fantastic time in jail!” (Jailhouse Accommodation on Instagram) (See Figure 3).
Figure 3 “Guilty of having a fantastic time” – a hostel guest poses for a fake mugshot at Jailhouse Accommodation. Image from Jailhouse Accommodation on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/jailhouseaccommodation/)
Strange and Kempa (2003) argue that the solution to reckoning with vacant prisons does not lie in closing off these institutions and throwing away the key; well-conceptualized prison tours can educate visitors on a part of our justice system that often remains shrouded in mystery (and where abuses have historically flourished in that very opacity) (402). Tracing the lives written on cell walls can also involve powerful acts of bearing witness to the pains of imprisonment. However, tourism practices that aim to construct a facsimile of punishment for the sake of entertainment or a novel “experience” in these walls – without regard to current practices of incarceration – ought to be subject to critique. At least, these venues should sensitize visitors to the experiential gap between the touristified versions of incarceration they offer and the ongoing, everyday role of prisons in the delivery of pain. Welch (2015) speaks of the prison as a form of “architecture parlante,” but sometimes the architecture does not speak enough. The prison often looks and feels like “heritage,” but the pains of imprisonment are very much part of our present.
References
Brown, M. (2009). The culture of punishment: Prison, society, and spectacle. New York: NYU Press.
Ferguson, M., Walby, K., & Piché, J. (2016). Tour guide styles and penal history museums in Canada. International Journal of Tourism Research, 18(5), 477-485.
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