ABSTRACT
People have always had a somewhat morbid and voyeuristic fascination with the macabre: a desire to witness and vicariously experience violence, suffering and death. For most of us, with no first-hand experience of criminality and punishment, prison tourism offers us the opportunity to see inside these ‘closed’ institutions, to experience a range of motivations and become part of a growing interest in the ‘spectacle of punishment’. 1 In this way, visits to institutions of punishment become the ultimate voyeuristic criminological experience. Tourism to such sites, in the form of decommissioned prisons, prison museums and carceral tours, is, however, hugely controversial. In this chapter we will briefly review the growing research in this field and discuss the UK context, where penal tourism is less developed and the sites relatively unexplored. In our discussion of two historical sites – the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham and Derby Gaol – we will consider the commodification of prisons for public consumption, and ask whether such institutions present a sanitised, sensationalised or distorted view of offenders and their punishment.
