Penal Optics and the Struggle for the Right to Look: Visuality and Prison Tourism in the Carceral Era

Abstract

From fortress prison museums to community jail houses, bed and breakfast “cells” (Schept 2014) to fine dining at London’s Clink (MacEacheran 2015), the carceral regime continues to innovate. From its early conceptions (Strange and Kempa 2003; Brown 2009), the study of penal tourism has navigated these various sites, expanding into an emergent and increasingly robust area of research. As a body of knowledge, it expresses the potential to play an important role in carceral and prison studies and the sociology of punishment as it points to a convergence of penal, visual, political, and historical problems. And because it takes tourism as its focus, it is unavoidably the study of penal configurations within the spatialized contradictions of global neoliberal capitalism. In less than a decade, however, scholars have thoughtfully demonstrated the pitfalls of assuming penal tourism as solely reflecting a commodified form of base consumption. The onus of historical preservation; the creation of public memory, memorialization, and penal history; the record of social suffering and appeal to human dignity; and the struggles for other altogether alternative meanings are all inscribed in more and less visible ways in the commodified production of carceral tourism. Scholarly analyses, consequently, range in their focal points, including emergent national and international forms of prison tours (Welch and Mauare 2011; Welch 2012, 2013, 2015; Wilson 2008), the hierarchies of power in tour design (Wilson 2008), the problematized performances of authoritative tour scripts (Piché and Walby 2010, 2012), the extensive history and historicizing force of prison tourism (Brown and Barton 2015), its contested ethics and pedagogies (Dey 2009; Greenhouse 2003; Piché and Walby 2012; Wilson et al. 2011), its cultural power through the transmission of penal meanings (Brown 2009; Welch 2015), the intentional omission of prisoner presence in tour narratives (Wilson 2008), and the still underexplored experiences of tourists themselves (Ferguson and Piché 2015; Wilson 2008).