Abstract
Crime and punishment stories have proliferated in recent years, and are now found in a wide variety of cultural products such as film, news reporting, documentaries and websites. By taking a more explicit narrative approach to the conclusions drawn by those who study these punishment stories, we were able to construct a framework of narratives (see Chap. 7), each of which has been found to manifest within these stories. The aim of this current chapter is to consider the extent to which the punishment narratives are expressed within the stories Texas tells in its punishment-related tourist sites. Unlike punishment stories told in many other cultural products such as film, news reports or TV series, these tourist site stories are not chronological and rarely adhere to an event-driven plot trajectory. Instead, they tell multiple stories within a single space which overlap, reinforce and at times contradict one another. However, certain themes do repeat themselves within this collection of Lone Star stories, themes which offer explanations as to how, why and who Texas punishes.
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Thurston, H. (2016). Museum Stories of a Distinctly Tough Texas. In: Prisons and Punishment in Texas. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53308-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53308-1_8
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