ABSTRACT
Focusing on the history of Canada’s first penitentiary, this chapter examines the crucial, though under-recognized, role of sound in the way carceral space is constructed, modified, and remembered. Drawing from archival materials related to Kingston Penitentiary, it first outlines the silent system as spatial articulation of sonic power in the penitentiary’s first century, from 1835 to 1932. It then traces technological change in the sonic structuring of prisons, and the resulting implications of sound for contemporary prison populations. It concludes with a call for historical geographers to take up sonic methods as a way of engaging more fully with usable carceral pasts.
