5 - Carceral Tourism

Summary

Carceral tourism incorporates criminal justice sites that have been characterised by inflicting pain on past inmates through the administration of justice and includes prison, police and courthouse museums (Pichéand Walby, 2018). While Welch (2013, 479) argues that prison museums invert the ‘Disney’ experience, and essentially become the ‘antithesis of “the happiest place on earth” ‘ (Williams, 2007, 99), many, if not all carceral tourism sites in Australia sit on Stone's (2006) lighter side of the dark tourism spectrum, despite the often ‘heavy’ subject material that these sites deal with. Most of these criminal justice tourist sites can be categorised as dark dungeons’, providing tourists with ‘a combination of entertainment and education as a main merchandise focus’ at the original site of justice (Stone, 2006, 154).

Visitors to these sites are often encouraged to participate in the criminal justice process – be arrested, sentenced, locked up and maybe even threatened with execution. At night, tourists are invited to participate in ghost tours and are told even more gruesome and confronting stories of justice being enacted (or evaded). Stone suggests that dark dungeons should occupy the centre ground of the spectrum because such sites are authentically located (at a decommissioned prison or courthouse, for example) and the material being dealt with is necessarily ‘dark’ and confronting. The reality is that in many cases the ‘entertainment’ wins out, and these sites are more ‘light’ than ‘dark’, with high levels of tourism infrastructure catering to a range of audiences, often including schoolchildren.

This may be because carceral tourism within Australia is a mix of dark dungeons and dark fun factories. There is a commercial ethic at these sites, and while they present real ‘macabre’ events, the entertainment focus can overshadow the darker messages being presented.

Penal sites

Penal (prison) museums and tourism sites allow the bystander to ‘gaze at the spectacle of pain and suffering’ while keeping ‘spectators at a safe social distance from the realities of cruelty (for example, torture)’ (Welch, 2013, 480). Reasons why tourists visit penal museums are varied: ‘some visit out of curiosity, others visit to remember loved ones’ (Walby and Piché, 2011, 452) or ‘to retrace history, to search for ghosts, and to view otherwise prohibited places’ (Brown, 2009, 90).