Making Punishment Memorialization Pay? Marketing,Networks,and Souvenirs at Small Penal History Museums in Canada

Penal History Museums and Tourism Studies

A significant portion of the literature on prison museums has explored larger and more renowned decommissioned carceral sites that now operate as penal history sites. Among them are studies on Alcatraz off the shores of San Francisco (e.g., Strange & Kempa, 2003), Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia (e.g., M. Brown, 2009; Bruggeman, 2012), Robben Island near Cape Town (e.g., Shackley, 2001; Shearing & Kempa, 2004), and The Clink in London (Welch, 2013). This research examines the meanings of incarceration and penality communicated to visitors, and how museum staff preserve heritage in these milieus.

Although scholars interested in penal history museums have focused on smaller locations with less cache in the public imagination (e.g., Dewar & Fredericksen, 2003), it is only recently that these heritage sites have received more attention (e.g., Welch, 2012; Wilson, 2011). Morin (2013, p. 10) argues that small-scale and local heritage sites, such as decommissioned jails and lockups, although possessing “no particular capital-generating potential,” should still be included in social histories of the carceral. Gordon (2008) likewise insists that these sites should be examined in tourism studies despite their size and relative popularity. Gordon uses the idea of “community exhibitions” to refer to cultural sites put together by local people and historical societies primarily for small numbers of visitors who may venture to their rural area.

In Canada, penal history museums are mostly small, rural sites rather than large urban tourist destinations (see Walby & Piché, 2015, 2015). Our study supplements literature concerning these museums by diversifying the range of heritage tourism sites examined. Many of these remote, rural sites in Canada are obscure, in that they are relatively unknown outside small regional tourism networks. Size and location matters for the marketing of such sites, the networks they develop with other cultural and historical attractions, and for the kinds of souvenirs they sell. Analysis of small tourism ventures has been deemed as underdeveloped (Tinsley & Lynch, 2001).

This study is a response to calls (e.g., Friel, 1999) for more research on small tourism outfits, their marketing practices, and network ties such as communication and information sharing with other museums or cultural and government entities. The case of penal history museums in Canada provides insight into tourism marketing, networking, and souvenirs that is a key conceptual framework for examining consumption in all domains of heritage tourism, not just the smaller museums we examine here. Such an approach also enhances scholarship on the commodification of punishment that often focuses on the extraordinary and ostentatious, such as reality television programs based on surveillance camera footage of a jail (see Lynch, 2004), to the detriment of understanding subtler ways of consuming histories of incarceration, including through museums.

Tourism Marketing and Networks

A diverse literature on tourism marketing explores how museum managers communicate to visitors the uniqueness and benefits of a site in order to attract consumers and generate income (Tsai, 2012). Dwyer, Cvelbar, Edwards, and Mihalic (2012) observe that tourism sites often try to measure relative attractiveness and may hire managers to implement entrepreneurial strategies, as well as garner more visitor support. In particular, web-based marketing is noted to have assumed a central role in the 21st century tourism practices. With the development of Web 2.0 platforms that allow for interaction and content sharing between users, Hays, Page, and Buhalis (2013) and Law and Ng (2011) argue that social media has changed the way tourism companies relate to visitors. How small penal history museums in Canada engage in marketing and, in turn, what networks have emerged to promote other tourism operations with similar content and features have not been studied.

Contributions to literature on tourism networks are similarly varied. Shih (2006) explores the relationship between cars, tourism networks, multidestination trips, and visits to smaller sites that are more difficult to get to. This “drive tourism” is typical of Canadian road trips and family vacations, where destinations tend to be away from major cities and only accessible by car. Indeed, our research team members drove thousands of kilometers across Canada just to access many of the 45 penal history museums, where we conducted field observations and interviews. Yet while in Canada museum visitors may drive more often, it has also been suggested they cover shorter distances, which has significant consequences for the success of rural cultural sites (Hardy, 2006). Small, rural jail museums cannot exist without drive tourism. Novelli, Schmitz, and Spencer (2006) recommend that small tourism enterprises band together in regional networks to increase their prominence. These networks or lack thereof have significance for tourism providers. For Pavlovich (2003), network ties help direct the flow of visitors and capital. She suggests that even weak network ties or seemingly insignificant connections such as cross-advertising can result in important developments for tourism clusters. Through examination of the ties among tourism organizations and penal history museums in Canada, we contextualize existing findings on the formation and strength of tourism networks. We highlight how the shared histories of these locales as decommissioned sites of confinement, along with their shared commitment to transforming narratives and experiences of punishment into commodities for public consumption, rarely results in the formation of interpenal history museum networks. Instead, these heritage sites tend to find themselves in regional networks of tourism providers, in some cases unaware of nearby penal history museums in the same region or province.

Souvenirs

The third dimension of the commodification of punishment that we consider is gift shops and souvenirs. The issue of gift shops and souvenirs found in other tourism studies literature (e.g., J. Brown, 2013) has not yet been explored in the context of penal history museums. By souvenirs we mean the objects and materials that are bought or otherwise acquired from tourism attractions (Gibson, 2014). These range from expensive and one-of-a-kind items to mass-produced trinkets. As with issues of marketing and networks, we show how the selling of souvenirs is shaped by site histories as facilities that formerly held prisoners, as well as their locations and sizes.

Souvenirs play several key roles in tourism networks. They act as symbolic reminders for visitors that provide a tangible vehicle through which to preserve memories (e.g., of family trips), commodity revenue for entities that sell these items, mobile marketing devices that translate into more visitors, and reminders of tourist experiences (Decrop & Masset, 2013). Torabian and Arai (2013) identified additional rationales when analyzing travel blogs. They found that visitors enjoyed souvenirs more when local materials were used in a product, when nearby artists designed and crafted the item, when an artist’s hallmark was displayed, and when they were unique or of high quality.

Similarly, Swanson and Timothy (2012) examine the issue of authenticity of souvenirs in tourism but add that these items are not always purchased when other acquired objects associated with the site such as brochures are available. They also suggest the relationship between authenticity and commodification can be a negative one, as when visitors think of souvenirs as less authentic the more expensive they are. This is why Collins-Kreiner and Zins (2011) argue that the notion of souvenir should not be limited to things bought and sold but should include any item offered by the site that reminds a visitor of their experience. These authors further suggest that visitors may find free items as significant as the most expensive objects they purchase. ¹ While we do not account for visitors’ understandings of souvenirs here, we do assess the diversity, as well as the spatial presentation of souvenirs in Canadian penal history museums and demonstrate its overlap with tourism marketing and the related commodification of punishment.

Data and Method

Our study sample began with the inclusion of penal history museums in Canada noted in R. Brown (2006) and that were part of regional or provincial-territorial tourism networks. This initial subset snowballed as we conducted our field visits and became aware of other penal history sites. This strategy maximized the diversity of our sample (N = 45), permitting the inclusion of rural and urban, as well as Anglophone and Francophone sites. Our findings are based on 52 semi-structured interviews with penal museum historians, curators, administrators, as well as other staff and volunteers at most sites. Interview questions focused on the history of the museums, the original purposes of the sites, and how these inform their curation, administration, and promotion. This was supplemented by collection of newspaper stories, promotional, and other materials relevant to their operations and history. Observations of penal museum staff and volunteers were documented using field notes, photography, and occasionally video. We analysed this material using a focused coding approach to qualitative data analysis, coding for themes related to broader commodification of punishment narratives that frame experiences as products for consumption by museum visitors. We organized our findings according to the themes of marketing strategies, networks, and sale of souvenirs that emerged from our data set.

Our analysis describes how tourism marketing, networking, and souvenirs at many penal history museums in Canada are reflective of patterns with small, rural tourism enterprises. One limitation in our method is that we did not include an examination of interaction among visitors or analysis of visitors’ accounts of how they consume these penal commodities to assess what forms of marketing resonate with tourists and what souvenirs mean to them. Such research, along with comparative studies that examine tourism marketing, networking, and souvenirs at work in similar heritage sites elsewhere would further enhance scholarly understandings of the commodification and consumption of punishment, and other related phenomena.

Types of Penal History Museum

Based on our field research in penal history museums in Canada, we developed a four-fold typology of different sites by considering the characteristics of the sites (size of the penal facility, extent of the work that had gone into retasking, number of staff, etc.) and the concept or “business model” of each location (e.g., strictly museums vs. sites with various uses; see Walby & Piché, 2015, 2015). The first type of site is the fully dedicated penal history museum (n = 4). Fully dedicated museums are housed in a decommissioned carceral facility. The museum is the main attraction. These sites are the largest of the kinds we analyze, although these Canadian museums are not nearly as large as Alcatraz or Eastern State Penitentiary. The second kind of penal history museum is the hybrid site. This category refers to sites where their penal history may not be the main focus—it could be secondary, tertiary, or one among many historical aspects (n = 23). For instance, some of these locales are colocated within archival or cultural sites. Other hybrid penal history museums are co-located with hospitality or tourism services including pubs and lodging (n = 5). Third is the peer-in site (n = 8), which are small lockups contained one or two cells most often located in remote, rural areas across Canada. Most of the peer-in sites we examined were single-room sites. Visitors can enter some of the sites during their limited hours of operation, while others are only viewable from outside. The rare-use site (n = 5) constitutes a fourth type of museum encountered in our study. Located in decommissioned penitentiary, prison, jail, or lockup, this type of site has not been transformed into penal history site on a full-time basis and either sits dormant most of the time or has been repurposed into another kind of facility such as a government office building. On rare occasions, these sites are part or the focus of tours (e.g., haunted walks, community open-door events) led by local tourism companies, non-profit organizations or government authorities. The hybrid and peer-in types of penal history museums, which are mostly small and medium enterprises, are the primary focus of this article.

Strategies for Marketing at Small Penal History Sites

We begin with the question of how penal history museums strategically market themselves. In Canada, except in rare cases of extensive national or provincial government support, most sites of this kind struggle with funding, making the ability to effectively market themselves especially vital to their survival. In addition to marketing, these sites compete with one another for summer student work grants, encourage donations, and develop other revenue streams, such as selling goods at local flea markets and yard sales. In some cases, these sites are able to call upon volunteers to fill gaps in necessary resources. As one museum manager put it, “The village itself, the community, the town council couldn’t provide us with any money. So we found volunteers, and we raised some funds locally and restored the building to its original way.” Other penal history museums cited difficulties in finding both paid and volunteer staff to run the museum:

The newer generation is trying to survive in this economy. Face it: they have their priorities. The hockey players, they have the sports, and the dancing. They are torn in so many different ways that it’s harder to entice the younger generation to do the volunteering and to support the facilities.

As this same museum manager summarized: “You do what you can to keep your head above water.”

Responsibility for penal history marketing varied between sites. In many of the smaller, hybrid use museums we analyzed, marketing duties were embedded into the already diverse daily routines of museum curators. As one interviewee explained:

You’re never just an administrator in this facility. . . . I oversee all of the financials, I do all the budgeting, I take care of all correspondence, and all the official documents. I oversee all the exhibits. We manage the collection and creation of different programming, such as the tours, the hands-on activities, demonstrations, open houses, Aboriginal Day, Canada Day. . . . Overall, it’s my responsibility to market the facility. I’m also involved in the fund-raising. I supervise that, train staff, and when I need to, I wash the bathrooms down.

The curator alone oversaw management of this site and was one of two employees running the entire operation after the summer season when government grants for student employment came to an end. This was the most common staffing setup for the sites, though a few penal history museums received greater funding and were more specialized, with museum departments designated for specific tasks, including marketing, education, and research.

Penal history museum staff responsible for the marketing of what these former sites of punishment offer in terms of encounters with the history (e.g., archival materials) and realities of incarceration (e.g., opportunities to spend time in prison cells) do so in several ways, from distributing brochures and posting newspaper ads to maintaining websites with descriptions of their exhibits, directions to the site, and online donation opportunities. As one museum manager put it, “We do a combination of events. . . . We do radio, we have brochures, we have a website. . . . We have posters, signs . . . the normal marketing efforts.” In an effort to generate repeat business, some sites like the Federal Penitentiary Museum—a fully dedicated penal history museum in Kingston, Ontario—have created a membership system run by charitable organizations linked with the site where members are invited to attend annual general meetings and also receive periodic newsletters (called The Keeper’s Journal) summarizing past events, honors, and other news. Other locations such as L’Orignal Old Jail in L’Orignal, Ontario, have e-mail lists where visitors can sign up and receive newsletters (called The Informer) about past activities, new exhibits, and upcoming events. Overall, the marketing activities of these heritage sites were primarily local and on-site. In the smaller, rural sites, we did not find much marketing and advertising in print media, television, or radio (see Thomas, 1989) as found in larger tourism outfits. Moreover, such strategies show that these historical sites are not homogeneous in their offerings to the public.

Three rhetorical strategies used by penal history museums to attract visitors and market the sites emerged through our analysis. Each represents a different approach to the commodification of punishment. First, penal history museums can emphasize the repurposing of the decommissioned carceral site as an authentic museum experience. As we explore elsewhere (Walby & Piché, 2015), penal history museums adopting this approach make claims about the alleged authenticity of the prison museum experience. In the words of the brochure of Old Prison of Trois-Rivières in Quebec: “you’ll get a sense of what life behind bars was really like at the time . . . come experience incarceration by visiting grounds rich with history and by spending the night in prisoners’ cells.” At the Morrin Centre in Quebec City, Quebec, the message is similar:

The tour gives participants a glimpse at what it was like to be a newly-arrived prisoner in the 19th century. The prisoners first meet the gaoler to get an introduction to prison life. Following this encounter, they meet the prison doctor, who recommends treatments for any sickness they might have using the most recent advances in medicine.

At the Federal Penitentiary Museum, the theme continues: “Join the more than 25,000 people per year who ‘do some time at’ the Penitentiary Museum . . . it’s time well spent!” This first strategy can be contrasted with approaches to the commodification of punishment that are explicitly staged or inauthentic in their representations of penality. For example, at the Gaol Museum in St. Claude, Manitoba, an inauthentic and ostentatious form of manufacturing an experience for visitors was promoted: “The only place in Canada where you can have fun in prison . . . it is now possible to visit the cells, put on a prisoner’s uniform and have your photograph taken.” Here, the idea of imprisonment is transformed from an unpleasant to pleasurable experience to attract patrons.

Second, penal history museums can stress those historically specific features they view as making them unique relative to other sites across the country. Historical specification works as a reductive strategy in the commodification of punishment, reducing the larger history of punishment in a site to those narratives or artifacts perceived by museum staff as most likely to draw visitor attention. Thus, the Huron County Museum and Historical Gaol in Goderich, Ontario, promotes its place in the history of Canadian executions: “Visit the 1842 Huron Historic Gaol, site of Canada’s last public hanging.” Then there are claims about size, with at least three jail museums in the province of Ontario claiming to be the smallest lockup around. The sign on the front of the jail museum in Coboconk, Ontario, reads, “Welcome to Canada’s Smallest Jail and Ye-Old Craft Shoppe.” Yet not far away, in the town of Creemore, visitors are invited to see the “smallest jail in North America. At 15’ x 20’ it is built from local limestone and split face field stone.” The municipality of Tweed, Ontario, defends similar claims about the size of its heritage jail. Such heritage sites market themselves on the basis of being different from their counterparts. One museum manager articulated the reasoning behind this approach:

We try to keep it focused on . . . [the] County, because it is a unique challenge in this area that there are several museums in prisons so how do you stand out. We had to tell the . . . County story, we had to tell the . . . Jail story, we have to tell the prisoners’ story so there’s less detail there about the overall layer of the prison system in New Brunswick.

This emphasis on historical specificity can generate conflict between penal history museums when competing claims overlap, like the longstanding debate over the smallest jail described above that has found its way into newspaper articles posted inside some of the sites for visitors to compare. Similarly, minor tensions exist between a penal history museums in central Ontario and Ottawa over the issue of the last public hanging. As one staff member at the former explained at length:

We’ve had three hangings—two of them public and the third not public. The public hanging becomes a bit of controversy. It is technically the last public hanging in 1869 in our nation. They often talk of one in Ottawa [Ontario], would have been the assassination of Darcey McGee. And the hanging of, I believe the gentleman’s name was Wayland, took place there and it was a public hanging. They will say to themselves it was the last public hanging. . . . Ours was public, we just didn’t have the same publicity that a Darcy McGee would have. The legislation changed in 1870 that there were to be no further public hangings. But we have some pictures over at the jail that shows people on rooftops.

Finally, penal history museums can highlight how visits to their sites represent an exclusive opportunity unlike any other. The strategy of exclusive opportunism works by playing on the already exclusionary logic of the prison, recasting its restricted and outsider status in commodified form to attract visitors. As promoted on the website of Albert County Museum in Hopewell Cape, New Brunswick, visitors are offered a special “Museums Secrets Tour,” described as

an exclusive look into the inner workings of the Albert County Museum. Discover the People of the Tides with the Curator of the Museum. Hear the firsthand account of uncovering the 150 year old gaol cell graffiti. Learn unique and bizarre stories behind the artefacts. Have exclusive access to the basement of the County Gaol, the court house Evidence Storage and the Museum Artefact Storage. Have a rare look at the functioning of the Wheelwright Shop.

This third strategy, elevating claims about the rarity of one’s visit to an otherwise restricted site, is found notably in the marketing of open house events and those penal history museums (what we call rare-use sites) that open to the public only a few days a year or following the act of decommissioning (see Ferguson et al., 2014). In this way, penal history museums capitalize on prospective visitors’ presumed interests in the otherwise secret and forbidden site.

These three marketing strategies—authenticity, historical specificity, and exclusiveness—are key to the commodification of these museums as former sites of penality and to framing the experience of visitors. Messages along the lines of “come experience the rarity of our site” or “a day in jail” are central to how these museums connect with visitors and reach out to potential (often distant) audiences. Different penal history museums occasionally put the brochures of their counterparts inside their gift shops or advertise together in regional blocs, although generally we mostly found that there was a lack of what Heath and Wall (1992) call regional tourism marketing. Since some of these materials are found in many museums, it suggests that networks exist among some of these sites. It is the question of networks arising from marketing practices we turn to next.

Formation and Strength of Networks

The second dimension of consumption in tourism and commodification of punishment that we focus on is networking between museums, which enhance their ability to market and to draw visitors to their sites. Here, we turn to the question, How are network ties initiated and strengthened among penal history sites in Canada? When we first began developing our study on penal history museums in Canada, we expected a major element of their marketing would be to network with similar sites, whether regionally, provincially, nationally, or internationally in a coordinated effort. Different penal history museums could share resources, promote, and otherwise support one another in the effective marketing of the commodification of punishment to interested audiences.

Most interviewees informed us of an absence of network connections, both formal and informal, with other penal history museums in Canada and elsewhere. The reason for the lack of connection between different heritage sites was a failure to initiate contact. The connections were often not there, and the museum staff noted no reason for this. As one interviewee stated when asked whether or not they had connections with other penal history museums, “No. And that’s a really good point. But we have no further connection. I’ve been to Goderich [the Huron County Museum and Historic Gaol], that’s only jail museum I’ve ever been to.” One museum manager commented, “We don’t have, no, a real connection or partnership with any other prison museum. It’s a good idea though, I should do that.” Another site operator noted,

Other prison or jail museums I don’t have much of a connection with them. I know a couple and in NB [New Brunswick]. I’m part of the association museums NB and through that association we’re aware of each other, but there’s no real connection, we don’t consult each other how to interpret or what the overall message would be.

The lack of formal relationships between sites was most evident when museum curators, including one we interviewed in Saskatchewan where three penal history sites are located, were not aware of similar museums nearby.

Even in cases where connections between penal history museums were present, these connections did not necessarily combine to form a network of routine support and communication. Instead, these linkages tended to be task-specific and informal, assembled and disassembled in moments of specific need. As one museum manager told us,

If there are [any connections], they’re more collegial. Someone might contact us or we might contact another jail museum or history jail, for example in Goderich [Ontario], if we had a question and wanted to know what did they do, we just treat that within the museum sector. . . . They probably have the same issue as related to the space limitations. Jails don’t make the best museum exhibition spaces.

In a similar vein, another museum manager explained when asked about connections with other penal history museums:

Not really. We were in contact with the Kingston [Ontario], we needed some pictures of what the cells looked like, the doors looked like. We were setting up this exhibit and they sent us some pictures, but [nothing] other than that really.

That these particular museum managers reported any relationship at all was an exception that arose because of their shared focus on promoting the carceral past of their facilities to entice visitors to consume penal heritage.

A second networking approach involves establishing a connection with nonpenal history museums, museum and historical associations, local government departments, tourism providers, and other organizations that could share resources and spread the word. One way these connections are established is through association membership and links with outside organizations. Similar to corporations (Carroll & Carson, 2003), some penal history site boards of directors in Canada can be seen to mimic the strategy of network formation between museums and other agencies through the act of “directorate interlocking” (Mizruchi, 1996). One museum manager explained,

We have a local tourism association . . . and we’ve got one board member on that . . . we’re also members . . . [of the] museums association . . . board of directors and we’re members of the Canadian Heritage. . . . I chair the . . . museum in that zone . . . and we do partnership with . . . the zone and we partner with the . . . tourism association.

Connections outside of the penal history world varied according to site, but on the whole were far more frequent than links between penal history museums themselves. By networking with local tourism associations, penal history museums can access broader marketing campaigns geared toward bringing in greater numbers of outside visitors. As noted by one interviewee,

[The] County Tourism Association we are a member of and the Tourism Association is a great way. Basically we all work together to cross promote to try to get people to spend more time in . . . [the] County and spend more money. It’s part of our marketing strategy.

Relationships with bus tour companies were also mentioned, supporting the link noted earlier by Shih (2006) on networks and drive tourism:

We are starting to build a bit of a portfolio. There are a few bus companies now that we’ve had visit before to see our changing displays they were keen when we contacted them we’ve said look we are going to renovate the downstairs of the jail and make it a feature that became exciting so we’ve got a number of bus tours coming to visit us.

We have shown that smaller penal history museums tend to have fewer network connections than sites such as Robben Island near Cape Town, South Africa. ² However, different network relations characterized larger museums in our sample. For one museum manager, the number of outside connections his museum had was a product of the size and budget of the museum he was managing. This museum manager explained,

We’re that bigger facility. We’re the art gallery, the museum and the archives. And because we’re . . . owned and operated by a regional government, we’re connected into the tourism sectors, both for the City . . . where we’re physically resident but also for the Region . . . because we represent and serve the whole of the region. So we’re part of the Tourism Toronto initiatives, for the Greater Toronto Area. As well as local initiatives within the City. . . . So, because we’re a major cultural facility in the middle of a large municipality, or a large municipal area, we need to be involved with all kinds of economic development and tourism initiatives.

Scholars of social networks have referred to this process as node centrality, defined as a measure of the importance or popularity of a node, in this case a penal history museum, within the larger pattern of relations of which it is embedded. Central nodes can be measured in different ways, from the total number of immediate connections a node has in a network (called degree), to the extent to which a node is close to all other nodes using the shortest paths available (called closeness), to the frequency at which a node falls on the only path between other nodes, thus acting as a gatekeeper or “broker” (Borgatti & Everett, 2006). Central nodes and nodes with stronger network ties (see Ying & Norman, 2014) enjoy a greater influence over, and access to, network resources by virtue of their relative degree, closeness, or brokerage. In the marketing of commodified punishment, some penal history museums in Canada enjoy the benefits of centrality more than others.

Network connections between penal history museums and other tourism providers enable not just the sharing of funds or administrative know-how but the tour and exhibit space itself. Thus, another approach to networking occasionally mentioned by penal history museum staff is to send colleagues to nearby heritage sites in the hopes that they, as tour guides and other frontline staff, will be in a better position to answer visitor inquiries about other local attractions. This is also because many penal history museums in Canada serve as information centers for the communities they operate in. One site, for example, had operated first as a visitor information center for the town and had only recently began to capitalize on its location in an old jail building. Most penal history sites contained some source of information on other attractions in the local area, whether in the form of brochures or links on their museum webpages. The goal is reciprocity—not only will penal history museum staff be in a better position to promote and discuss other museums and attractions in the area, these other sites too will be in a position to spread the word about them. Moreover, by sharing visitor experiences with museum staff, administrators hope that they can foster in frontline staff the capability to share information about other sites. Penal history museum managers aim not only to have their staff communicating about other attractions but also to have other sites communicating about them. Making sure that museum staff are aware of surrounding attractions is also about ensuring they are not reporting misinformation about them, whether it be hours of operation or a question about exhibits. As the curator of one museum told us,

We’ll send our staff to Fort Carlton and Batoche [Saskatchewan] so they hear what they say and come back here and make sure we don’t contradict what they say and it’s the same for them. They’ll come here, hear what we say, so we help each other in the education of our staff.

Finally, through their connection with other sites, penal history museums may extend their marketing reach by sharing exhibit space, although this was uncommon in our sample. As one penal history museum manager discussed,

We have a wonderful partnership with [another heritage site] which is the number one tourism attraction in the province and they allow us to put our interpretation in some of their interpretive area as a lead so people can learn about us and come to visit us . . . when they have to wait for the tides.

All of this said, the lack of more sustained and formal networking that is characteristic of many of the small- and medium-sized enterprises we encountered limit opportunities for the kind of “network and destination branding” (Moilanen & Rainisto, 2009) that attracts more visits to a location.

Gift Shops and Souvenirs

As with marketing and networking, souvenirs sold at Canadian penal history museums reflect tendencies within smaller tourism enterprises. Gift shops in these sites are not separate from issues of tourism marketing and networks. Brochures and marketing materials are often placed in the gift shops, which include information about other tourism sites in the region, showing how tourism marketing, networking, and souvenirs converge. This is characteristic of smaller museums with a lack of space and limited resources.

Gift shops fulfill a range of needs for visitors and staff. First, they can serve as an added revenue stream for the penal history site. With many penal history museums in Canada facing considerable financial need, gift shops become a crucial source of capital. Second, they serve as a means of sharing knowledge about the site. Many penal history museums sell books about prison staff and/or prisoners held at their facilities or the history of their sites, which are often written by local authors. By making these available in the gift shop, these books serve to further the educational interests of museums by offering more information about their history than is available in the limited space of the sites. Third, as an engrained component of the museum, gift shops transform the space of the decommissioned penitentiary, prison, jail, or lockup adding to its overall tourism image. Along with curatorial staff, interpretive signage and distinctive marketing campaigns, a gift shop is a vital ingredient in the retasking of the defunct carceral site into “museum.” Finally, given the normalized place of the gift shop in contemporary museums, purchasable souvenirs are integral to the experience of visitors which the museum depends on. Not only do museum staff desire a space to sell things like books, which they have often written themselves, and other sources of added revenue, but visitors themselves may also demand these services to commemorate their brief sojourn “to the past,” as is promised at the Olde Gaol Museum in Lindsay, Ontario. While gift shops in penal history museums in Canada were common, we found the range of items they sold to be diverse, and reflective of the character of smaller, rural sites compared to larger, urban ones. As we illustrate, some museums engaged in the commodification of penality through the sale of punishment-themed items, while others sold a range of items, including trinkets that had nothing to do with punishment at all. We provide a few examples of these goods below and differentiate the kinds of gift shops in penal history museums based on the goods they sell.

First, we encountered punishment-themed gift shops, which sell goods that are mostly oriented toward the content and messages shared with visitors relating to their history as a site of confinement and penality. One site featuring this kind of gift shop is the Federal Penitentiary Museum in Kingston, Ontario, where one can find the “Keeper’s Cache.” Coffee mugs with a prisoner behind bars that disappear when hot beverages are poured into them, pins, postcards, and patches featuring images of neighboring Kingston Penitentiary that is now closed are among the penal commodities available for purchase at this fully dedicated penal history site. In addition, they sell T-shirts including one that incorporates the text “Jailhouse Rock” with an image of prisoners breaking limestone that was used to construct numerous buildings in the area and another for babies that reads “I spent 9 months on the inside.” A series of books that have been written about Canada’s first penitentiary and Kingston’s history more broadly are also available. Perhaps the clearest example of the commodification of penality is one that blurs the lines between punishment and its consumption (Lynch, 2004) in the form of items like Indigenous-themed toddler slippers produced by Aboriginal federal prisoners enrolled in CORCAN’s—the Correctional Service of Canada’s prison labor corporation—Fur and Shearling program. These items are sold on the basis of their cultural and carceral authenticity without mention of the role the country’s colonial history has played in the mass incarceration of First Nations peoples and Métis (Crete, 2014), showing how penal commodities tend to reinforce rather than challenge themes of punishment by their very design.

Second, we came across general- or regional-themed gift shops. For instance, at the gift shop in the Ye Olde Jailhouse in Coboconk, Ontario, visitors can purchase scarfs, blankets, stuffed animals, but nothing jail-themed per se. This gift shop is a consignment store where local people sell their handicrafts. In some cases, the items sold in the gift shops of penal history museums could be seen to fit the broader theme of the region, like antique grain elevator bottles in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan. The interpretive center has a gift shop that contains custom made Indigenous crafts, such as handmade moccasins, wood carvings, wheat weaving, and ceramics, along with historical books, cards, posters, T-shirts, and more.

Last, we found hybrid-themed gift shops that sell general or regional trinkets, as well as punishment-oriented goods and experiences. Examples include the gift shop at a museum in Beaverton, Ontario, where visitors can purchase T-shirts that say “I spent time in Beaverton jail.” Also available for purchase were books on the town’s history, copies of old newspapers, and tea cups. At the gift shop in Goderich, Ontario, visitors could purchase train conductor hats, model trains, a photocopy of a list of prisoner names with corresponding sentences, cork guns, mustache magnets, and many toys for kids. At the gift shop in St. Claude, Manitoba, visitors can purchase books written by members of the community. For two dollars, visitors can also have a picture taken behind bars in a black and white striped costume. At the gift shop in Tweed Jail visitors can purchase Tweed-themed T-shirts. Visitors can also take a picture behind bars with costume for free.

Although some of the gift shops in Canadian penal history museums did sell items such as mock handcuffs and branded these items with punitive rhetoric, the size and location of most of these museums prevents large-scale commercial production of souvenirs such as those found in other sites such as Alcatraz. ³ Thus, such items found at Canadian sites are unlikely to generate the kind of revenue that larger operations can. Another reason for the relative absence of punishment-themed souvenirs in small, rural penal history sites could reflect what sells based on visitor demographic and experience, which is different from larger sites in Canada and elsewhere.

Museum size also shapes physical design and layout of the space. A major consideration of operating a gift shop as part of a penal history site is location. We found that most if not all penal history museum gift shops were situated near the front of the site, often in the same room or adjacent to the front desk where visitors receive guidance, information, and pay an entrance fee or are instructed by signage to give a donation in a dropbox. Obvious reasons for this aside (i.e., items for sale are placed in the vicinity of the attendant operating the cash register who can take payments and answer inquiries), this positioning of gift shops near the entrance of the site reflects the dual role visitors are expected to play in the context of the museum. The first role is the more rational-economic one, and involves both the exchange of money and a more distanced experiential relation to the museum as exhibit space. The second takes form at the moment of exploration—the guided tour, the walking tour, the movie, and the day in prison—when visitors are expected to be imaginative, have fun, learn, recount memories, and take pictures. Visitors of Canadian penal history museums were encouraged regularly to move between these two roles, with instructions such as, “just get your ticket now, the tour starts in 2 minutes and you’ll have lots of time to look at the gift shop at the end, the tour actually ends right here.” Gift shops are also mentioned at the end of tours with directions such as, “please go check out the gift shop afterwards,” or are mentioned in brochures and on webpages. Because these sites are often small and rural, the design of the museums does not typically incorporate the gift shop in the way larger museums do, whereby the visitor is channeled into that area of consumption. Most gift shops only comprise a corner in the museums, such as a table or shelf by the front desk. The spatial relationship between the gift shop and the penal history museum varies between sites depending on the size and configuration of built space.