Staged authenticity in penal history sites across Canada

Abstract

Literature on penal tourism has examined meanings of imprisonment and punishment communicated in infamous American (e.g. Alcatraz, Eastern State Penitentiary), Australian (e.g. Fannie Bay Gaol, Port Arthur) and South African (e.g. Robben Island) sites. Yet such research has not extensively drawn from academic debates on authenticity and heritage that have become prominent in tourism research. This article examines the staging of authenticity in lesser-known penal history museums located across Canada. Whether large and aesthetically impressive or small and dingy, the existence of museums in original heritage penal sites raises questions about authenticity and how it is staged. Based on an analysis of field notes and interviews from visits to 45 penal history sites in Canada, we present four strategies (preservation, restoration, importation and creation) used by staff and volunteers at penal history museums to draw attention to four types of authenticity (architectural and spatial, tactile and visual, existential and narrative) that reinforce claims about the purported realities of incarceration found therein.

Keywords

Canada heritage museums penal tourism staged authenticity

Introduction

While many travellers seek escape, pleasure, friendships and relaxation, heritage tourists often try to access authentic remnants of culture and history of the locales they visit (Wickens, 2002). As MacCannell (1992: 168) put it, they desire authenticity. Penal history museums – regularly located in decommissioned penitentiaries, prisons, jails and lock-ups – are among the destinations that cater to such tourists around the world (Ross, 2012). Integral to the meanings communicated at these sites is the emphasis that curators, as well as other paid and unpaid staff, place on purportedly authentic accounts of what prison life was like for captives and their captors when the carceral facilities were operational. The concern for authenticity is reflected in the composition of dark tourism (Lennon and Foley, 2000; Stone and Sharpley, 2008; cf. Bowman and Pezzullo, 2009) and thanatourism (Seaton, 1996) destinations more broadly, where disaster, trauma and tragedy are showcased for education or entertainment purposes. In these milieus, decisions about curation and design are often shaped by not only concerns for safeguarding the historical integrity of a site, but also the staging of authenticity found therein (Mordue, 2005: 192).

Growing literature on penal tourism has explored meanings of imprisonment and punishment communicated in infamous American (e.g. Alcatraz, Eastern State Penitentiary), Australian (e.g. Fannie Bay Gaol, Port Arthur) and South African (e.g. Robben Island) sites (e.g. Strange and Kempa, 2003; Welch, 2015, 2013, 2012; Wilson, 2008). Yet such scholarship has not extensively engaged with issues of authenticity and heritage prominent in tourism research. This article examines how staged authenticity occurs in lesser-known penal history museums located across Canada, which have been largely overlooked in penal and dark tourism literatures. Often decommissioned prison and jails in Canada have been bestowed heritage status by municipal, provincial or federal governments. Whether large and aesthetically impressive or small and dingy, the existence of such museums in original sites of confinement and penality raises questions about authenticity and how it is staged or contrived.

Debates have emerged about what staging authenticity means and how to study it (Cook, 2010; Lacy and Douglass, 2002; MacCannell, 2008; Spracklen et al., 2013). Staged authenticity refers to displays curated or designed to appear as if they are an entrance into a back stage or authentic world, when these are contrived, front-stage performances. This staging is often conducted for reasons that include raising revenues or what Pretes (2002) calls mining the tourists, as well as enhancing the ‘morbid appeal’ (Huey, 2011: 382) of such sites. Front-stage presentations meant to show off purported back-stage areas occur in heritage sites, including decommissioned carceral spaces. For instance, sometimes the tourist is inside an original cell at an original site, but there is still a disjuncture and distance between the practice depicted and the experiences that tourists can have. This is only one of the challenges of trying to represent the experience and practice of imprisonment. Representing prisons is challenging because of the polyvocality of stories by prisoners and prison staff, along with the numerous untold stories of life and death in these carceral spaces. The complex layers of voice and violence make depicting what the prison or jail were like a near-impossible task. These sites try to do just that. Yet, there is variation in exactly how they try, depending on what shape the site is in and what the skills and background of the staff are.

Based on an analysis of field notes and interviews from visits to 45 penal history sites in Canada, and engaging with literature on meanings of authenticity (e.g. Wang, 1999), we assess four strategies (preservation, restoration, importation and creation) used by staff at penal history museums to highlight four types of authenticity (architectural and spatial, tactile and visual, existential and narrative) about the realities of incarceration found therein. This article is organized in four parts. First, we review the existing literature on the notion of staged authenticity. Second, we locate our study on penal tourism in Canada within the global context to highlight some of the salient aspects of this phenomenon in a country that has been largely ignored in academic debates on this topic, and we explain our methodological choices. We then examine the staging of authenticity by museum staff, a process that following MacCannell (1973) we call carceral stage setting. We conclude by reflecting on the significance of our findings for the penal tourism literature, arguing that the staging of authenticity contributes to the erasure of possible counter-narratives about incarceration.

Theorizing authenticity in tourism

The notion of authenticity has been much debated in tourism studies (Cohen, 1988; MacCannell, 1973; Olsen, 2002). Many of these contributions have focused on how authenticity is created by tourism providers. Zhu (2012) argues authenticity has a performative element, which is produced or composed by tourism providers (also see Edensor, 2000). Taylor (2001) likewise suggests these compositions may appear more authentic when tourism providers seem more sincere (also see Halewood and Hannam, 2001). Yet, there is much debate about how to conceptualize authenticity, with many scholars suggesting authenticity exists as part of a continuum. Martin (2010) asserts that culture and authenticity are not all made up and that when respondents in the field make claims about some practices or relics being authentic, we should take their words seriously. Wang (1999) differentiates between objective authenticity and constructivist authenticity, the former referring to original objects and architecture, and the latter referring to new meanings and versions of history projected thereon.

One of the first accounts of authenticity in the sociology of tourism was MacCannell’s (1973) notion of staged authenticity, which refers to strategic back-stage representations. These are front regions decorated or arranged to appear to be authentic back stages. According to this perspective, there are only levels of performance and combinations of front and back stage. MacCannell’s approach is indebted to Erving Goffman’s work on institutional display. This approach does not accept the dichotomy between authentic and invented traditions, but suggests that what is distinctive about late twentieth century culture is the pervasiveness of performative, staged displays that are manipulated and used as a resource to facilitate safe, at-a-distance tourist experiences.

MacCannell (2008) has since commented on the prison and staged authenticity in the twenty-first century. He argues that prisons are assumed to be society’s deepest back-stage region (MacCannell, 2008: 274), yet contemporary prison architecture is inviting and chic. In other words, MacCannell argues that the process we will call carceral stage setting is not limited to decommissioned carceral sites such as penal history museums, although these are important sites to conduct research on how authenticity is staged.¹ The contrived character of these spaces is suggestive not only of how staging authenticity transforms a space, but also of how prisons overlap with social life (see Turner, 2013; Wacquant, 2001) and the permeability of prison spaces (Baer and Ravneberg, 2008). As we demonstrate, these penal sites have become front regions planned to appear as back stages.

The notion of staged authenticity has been critiqued for negating the possibility that tourists may experience something as authentic at least from their own perspective. Pearce (1982) argues that there is a continuum of authenticity as far as tourist experiences go, while Chhabra et al. (2003) note that the staging of authenticity is not a furtive or secret practice. In fact, tourists demand it. For instance, their research on Scottish Highland Games across the United States has shown that perceived authenticity is a key indicator of tourist satisfaction. Even when tourists are aware that the event or relic is contrived, and the event occurs far away from the original heritage space, attempts at staging authenticity are still expected by tourists. Tourists may even yearn for the staged elements of culture to feel and look more authentic than in its original form. Chhabra and colleagues argue that the staging of such events and the depictions of culture therein provide economic benefits, which promotes tourism. These researchers take the position that ‘staging need not preclude authenticity… what is staged is not superficial since it contains elements of the original tradition’ (Chhabra et al., 2003: 715).

While this argument might be compelling for understanding Scottish Highland Games held in North America, it is worth considering the extent to which it applies to penal tourism sites often housed in decommissioned carceral spaces. Penal history museums offer unique challenges for staging authenticity. Notably, what is represented in these sites is human suffering and pain, which cannot be physically reproduced. Although tourists can be locked in a dark segregation cell for a few minutes, they can never endure what it was like to be chained to the floor, to be threatened by guards or gnawed on by rats and insects for weeks. There are also opportunities that curators take advantage of, given the heritage architecture and relics they work with. We suggest that four forms of authenticity are evident at penal history museums in Canada: architectural and spatial, tactile and visual, existential, and narrative. These four categories are derived in part from Wang’s (1999) authenticity typology and in part from the analysis of our data.

Debates about authenticity overlap directly with the process of carceral retasking, which Ferguson and colleagues (2014: 84) define as the transformation of a defunct site of confinement and punishment ‘into another enterprise that continues to reproduce imprisonment as a dominant idea and/or material practice’. Tourists seek encounters with authentic carceral spaces at such sites. In this sense, MacCannell’s (2008) argument about prisons and staged authenticity resonates in these now empty carceral chambers – the further into the back stage the penal tourist production takes us, the more we end up players on a front stage. Rather than use etic combinations of front and back stage to categorize such displays or propose dimensions of staged authenticity, we explore such staging in a grounded way using empirical examples from our study to highlight the carceral stage setting paid and unpaid staff engage in to convey authenticity to visitors. Aware of contributions in the literature that call for a continuum rather than a strict constructionist approach, we argue that attempts at carceral stage setting involve preservation, restoration, importation and creation strategies.

Penal history sites in Canada

Museums in Australia (Dewar and Fredericksen, 2003; Preece and Price, 2005; Smith, 2008; Strange, 2000; Wilson, 2011), South Africa (Buntman, 2003; Deacon, 2004; Hutton, 1997; Shackley, 2001; Shearing and Kempa, 2004) and the United States (Brown, 2009; Bruggeman, 2012; Morin, 2013) have been the primary sites of inquiry in penal tourism studies (Ross, 2012). This emphasis results from the focus on large sites with considerable cachet like Alcatraz where famous prisoners like Al Capone were held during the alcohol prohibition era in the United States. Overlooked in this literature are smaller local heritage sites, including decommissioned jails and lock-ups, with considerably less earning power than defunct penitentiaries and prisons (Morin, 2013). Members of small historical societies or other residents who aim to generate modest tourism interest in their localities often operate these smaller museums (see Walby and Piché, forthcoming A).

We have conducted fieldwork at 45 penal history museums in Canada (for the full list, see Walby and Piché, forthcoming B). The data gathered from these penal history sites include photographs and videos, field notes from guided tours and shadowing the curation process with paid and unpaid staff members, and 52 semi-structured interviews with museum operators and (un)paid workers. Additional data were retrieved from museum website content, as well as other marketing and promotional materials like brochures. To begin the data analysis process, we engaged in an initial round of open-ended coding wherein each researcher reviewed all 45 sets of data. We then engaged in focused coding wherein we identified key themes concerning displays and curation that we used to help form the four categories of staging we describe. We have altered names and details to protect the confidentiality and anonymity of respondents. A possible limit of our research design is that we have not interviewed tourists about their understandings of the museums and displays or how tourists respond differently to the staging strategies.

It should be noted that ‘crime’, ‘justice’, policing and court museums (see Gibson, 2006; Huey, 2011), or other locales like human rights or military museums where confinement and punishment may be depicted, were not included in our data set. Based on our visits and interviews with staff, we identified four kinds of penal history museums. To provide context regarding the kinds of sites that inform our analysis of carceral stage setting below, we briefly examine this typology that we unpack in greater detail elsewhere (see Walby and Piché, forthcoming B) and offer an example for each.

Fully dedicated museums are one type of penal history sites that tourists frequent in Canada. These museums are located in decommissioned carceral facilities. Members of our research team encountered four such sites, including The Old Prison of Trois-Rivières. An hour-and-a-half drive east of Montreal, this facility was built in 1822 and decommissioned by the Government of Quebec in 1986. Most cells (including cell doors and flooring) remain in their original architectural form. The site was designed to detain approximately 40 individuals, but often held many more. It now offers overnight stays, along with tours led by former prisoners and staff. There are regular French tours and English ones offered less frequently. The overnight stay called ‘Sentenced to One Night’ is promoted for small groups and youth over the age of 12, including school groups. Another programme for school groups called ‘The Great Escape’ requires the students to answer skill-testing questions to acquire keys and make their way out of the site. The category ‘fully-dedicated’ is not the same as ‘more authentic’ since, as we show below, all of these sites are curated and therefore contrived. Rather, fully dedicated means the museums in these locales are the primary attraction.

Hybrid sites are a second type of penal history museum that shares decommissioned carceral space with other entities. In Canada, there are 24 such sites co-located with other museums or archives, while 4 others share facilities with bars, restaurants, lodging and/or other tourism services. One such site is the Tweed Jailhouse, located 2 hours west of Ottawa by car. The jailhouse was built in 1898 and closed in 1950. During the 1990s, it operated as a community police office. The building measures 16 by 20 feet. For many years, locals claimed that the Tweed Jailhouse was the smallest such site in North America, although we have found the same claim continues to be made about other sites in Canada such as The Creemore Jail. No more than one person works in this building at a time. In the summer, high school and university students funded through Public Works Canada operate it. Inside, there is one cell and there are cardboard cut-outs of prisoners’ uniforms that people can pose behind for a picture. When the facility was operational, it housed up to four prisoners at a time, with a desk for the jail keeper. In 2013, funds were raised to purchase new signage and newer materials for displays. According to the guide we interviewed, tours typically last anywhere between 2 and 12 minutes, depending on visitor interest, the amount of questions asked and the amount of tourist information reciprocated (i.e. stories from locals). Only half of the building is dedicated to the jail museum. The other half of the building is full of brochures regarding additional tourist attractions in the area.

Peer-in sites are a third category of penal history museum that tourists can frequent. These one-cell or one-room lock-ups are located in rural and other remote areas. Access to the interior of such sites is often not possible, although some are opened for limited hours during the summer. Of the eight sites, only one – the Old Jail of Bruno, Saskatchewan – is located outside of Ontario, which is a province where historical societies often play an integral role in heritage preservation (Walby and Piché, forthcoming A). One example is the carceral retasking of Hillsdale Lock-up in Springwater, Ontario, into a penal history museum. The Hillsdale Lock-up is approximately 20 by 28 feet. In the 1920s, the building started to be used for other purposes, such as a polling station for elections. It continued to serve multiple purposes throughout the twentieth century. In September 2000, the Township of Springwater Heritage Committee cleaned the Hillsdale Lock-up building and started to brainstorm ideas of what to do with it. The building is in near-original condition despite the use of the facility for other purposes. The heritage value was not lost on the tour guide we interviewed: ‘This is the township’s only historical site […] I don’t have any records, any township records anyways, of them ever wanting it to come down’. The site has been turned into a museum. On 18 September 2010, the Springwater Heritage Committee organized a Heritage Day at the Hillsdale Lock-up. This example shows the process of carceral retasking at an early, formative phase with Springwater Heritage Committee members just beginning ‘stage setting’ (MacCannell, 1973) at this decommissioned carceral site.

We have also examined rare-use sites. These are former sites of confinement and punishment, which primarily sit dormant or serve other purposes (e.g. municipal or provincial office buildings and storage facilities). These sites are occasionally open to the public for special visits or exhibitions. Members of our research team have conducted fieldwork at five such penal history sites, including the Middlesex County Administration Building that promotes tours of its facility as a former jail during the annual Open Doors event in London, Ontario. One remaining cell block is also made available for pictures when the hall located on the site is rented out for weddings. On the day a member of our research team visited the site, he was informed by one of the staff members that ‘over 1,200 people had come through’ since they opened in the morning. During crowded tours, one learns about the brickwork on the building, the history of the courthouse that was co-located with the jail, as well as some notable events that had occurred in the area, ‘from the truly bizarre to the normal crimes like murder, theft, and everything else’. During the introduction, a staff member noted that hangings took place on site, the last one of which occurred in the 1950s. Following this, one of the staff interviewed noted that visitors are usually directed to one of two floors: ‘on the top floor you’ll find the courthouse; on the bottom floor you’ll find the last remaining cell block. When you go down to the jail you’ll see just how crude and rustic things were. It’s quite a spooky experience’.

We have offered an overview of the types of penal sites that dot Canada’s carceral landscape and provided examples of how these sites are curated and manipulated in ways to communicate certain messages to tourists. Now we examine how these museums depict different kinds of authenticity as it relates to confinement and punishment.

Carceral stage setting

Museum staff members and volunteers are central to the process of staging authenticity, and are akin to what Edensor (2001: 69) refers to as directors and stage-managers in his typology of key workers in tourism performances. We observed four strategies employed by museum staff members and volunteers to convey to tourists that their museum is an authentic carceral site. The curation of these spaces often involves the preservation of building features and spaces, as well as objects and documents that offer a window into living and working inside them. Restoration work is conducted where the facilities or contents within them have fallen into disrepair or have been altered over the years. Where gaps exist, ranging from archival materials to objects used to inform tour guide and placard narratives, one can also observe the importation of content and goods from other penal tourism purveyors or the creation of such items based on the imaginations of those involved in museum curation. These four categories represent a continuum of carceral stage setting. Preservation denotes trying to ‘freeze’ the heritage aspects of the site, whereas creation connotes an ostentatious form of ‘making it up’. The strategies do not apply equally to each kind of authenticity (e.g. importation applies most closely to tactile and visual authenticity). Examples of each of these stage-setting strategies are provided as we explore the forms of authenticity portrayed in Canadian penal tourism sites.

Architectural and spatial authenticity

Built heritage refers to preservation of buildings and monuments created centuries ago, comprised of material elements that have changed little and thus provide tourists an encounter with the past. Heritage is argued to be fundamental to the idea of authenticity, though the latter can take many shapes (Martin, 2010; Taylor, 2001; Zhu, 2012). For example, ‘original authenticity’ refers to the presence of design and material incorporated in the earliest form of the site (Andriotis, 2011). Architectural and spatial authenticity occupy this domain on the continuum described above and explained below. As Wang (1999) notes, object-centred authenticity is often supposed to be the most objective given the historical value of the relics and buildings on display. There is an assumed ‘noncontentious genuineness of an observable thing’ such as architecture and also objects (Reisinger and Steiner, 2006: 69). Even when it comes to the most longstanding, sometimes literally concrete, elements of penal history sites, staff use numerous strategies to stage authenticity.

Given that the vast majority of the penal history museums in our sample are located in decommissioned carceral facilities, it is not surprising that claims related to the authenticity of these sites are often made with regard to their architecture and built spaces. In some cases, curators have chosen preservation as a primary staging strategy. At the Historic Cornwall Jail, for instance, its operators have decided to leave the inside of the site as they found it when it was decommissioned in 2002. The peeling paint, the bare floors, the stony visitors’ stations, the cells and the few common area for the prisoners are all as they were the day the jail closed. The worker who greets tourists at the front door emphasizes the original decor. However, this sort of presentation is a form of staged authenticity. The aesthetics of the space have largely been preserved. Yet, the visitors lack access to the context of confinement, and the threat of violence from guards and from other prisoners, so the extent to which an authentic experience of imprisonment can be had remains limited. There is a disjuncture and distance here between the practice depicted and the experiences tourists can have (also see Brown, 2009), which allows penal spectators to be able to take pleasure in viewing the macabre suffering of others (Huey, 2011: 396). This element of carceral stage setting applies to the gallows at the Ottawa Jail hostel as well, though this example next overlaps with existential authenticity. The gallows at the Ottawa Jail hostel are built directly into the stone edifice and have been preserved. The trap door hangs open as visitors on the guided tour stand below and ponder the practice of hanging. Yet witnessing a hanging, most of which were not as clean and quick as movie depictions lead us to believe, is beyond comprehension to those in today’s crowd. It goes without saying that the same applies for being hung.

Restoration is another prominent strategy. This strategy involves attempts at trying to get the historical record right in renovating or fixing existing sites. At the old lock-up in Providence Bay, Ontario, the current owner of the site describes how he used the old cell doors and other materials from the site to restore much of the building. He has turned the site into a cabin that visitors flock to for vacation during the summer months. In St. Claude, the director of the old jail site indicated,

… we got together and said, ‘Let’s restore it. Let’s save this historic building as a historical site and make a museum out of it’. We got a grant from Heritage Manitoba … A little bit of money, which helped us in the restoration. We were about eight or nine people working a whole summer in restoring it to the way it really was. We had a man, a senior citizen who used to live here. He did tell us, ‘I remember how it was inside there. There was an entrance with a table for the constable and a little pot-belly stove type of thing and two cells. Each cell had a bunk’. So he explained to us how it was done and we drew plans.

In Goderich, a local blacksmith restored a weathervane on the roof of the old jail complex. The museum staff also had plans to restore the historic toilets and sinks inside of the museum so that tourists could relieve themselves half way through a tour. However, attempts at restoration can sometimes change the way the site is viewed and understood. For instance, the jail museum at Alberta Beach is a former one-room jail that was situated in a historical village. The jail had been used as a cottage until some volunteers had decided to restore it, which consisted of redoing the building and adding metal bars to the windows. The volunteers also turned it into a two-room jail from its original one-room design. This example shows how attempts at preservation can turn to more manipulative strategies.

While preservation and restoration work associated with architecture and spatial features are usually indicative of attempts to convey objective authenticity (Wang, 1999), there are also examples of authenticity whereby new architectural and spatial features are created to communicate the realness of penal tourism sites in Canada. An example of creating new built spaces can be found at the Assiginack Museum located in the former Manitowaning Jail on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. During an interview, the staff member discussed how the features of the jail wing of the museum had been manipulated. A cell had been moved from one end of the building to another and furnished with new materials and decor. Such changes were carried out to highlight the cell by placing it in a more prominent location. Bars had been put on all of the exterior windows as well, which had been installed after the expansion of the museum years after the closure of the jail. In fact, all of the original windows of the jail were encased in drywall as part of the interior of the museum at the time of our visit. At other sites such as St. Claude Gaol in Manitoba in Western Canada where such buildings were less often made out of stone and thus were often dismantled in the mid-twentieth century, a replica of the original jail or lock-up has been constructed, although tour operators neither shared this information with tourists unless asked nor made it apparent in their promotional materials. Another example of the creation strategy can be found at the Keillor House Museum in New Brunswick. This site houses many relics related to Dorchester Penitentiary, including a replica jail cell built by a prisoner from the facility.

Tactile and visual authenticity

Incorporating objects that one can touch and see is a strategy used to convey tactile and visual authenticity to tourists. This category of authenticity incorporates a focus on the experience of tourists or the projection of meaning of the relics onto tourists (also see Wang, 1999). Most penal tourism sites in Canada feature relics such as handcuffs, restraining devices and weapons created by prisoners, which are kept in glass cases for viewing. Yet, the descriptions of when and where these relics were used are often incomplete or missing altogether. In many instances where museum staff and volunteers were asked questions about these objects, they too seemed uncertain about their origins as many of them were obtained through donations from local citizens.

There are clear examples of tactile and visual authenticity in our sample. For instance, at the Gore Bay Museum, which was formerly the Manitoulan District Jail in Ontario, a large wooden table located in what was the small four-cell range for incarcerated men has been preserved in the room where it stood when the jail was operational. On the surface of the table, there are numerous carvings, including the names of former prisoners, caricatures of police officers and guards, as well as objects such as steamships and boats that can be seen on Manitoulan Island, which is surrounded by the waters of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. Tourists are invited to cast their gaze upon the table. Some try to run their fingers through the grooves to get closer to prisoners’ experiences.

The importation of objects is also integral to staging tactile and visual authenticity in some museums. At the Morrin Centre in Quebec City, an example of importation can be found in the replicas of heaters and beds that are not original to site, which were created and placed inside cells. These items are on display as tourists enter and exit these areas. In addition, some other relics are rented to this museum and are not original to the site. For instance, as the curator noted, ‘In the centre of the room there was a display case, which contained a nine-tail whip, a ball and chain and a pillory’, none of which ‘were used at this jail’. At St. Claude Gaol in Manitoba, a police museum in the province loaned relics to the site. At Woodslee Jail in Ontario, security devices such as batons, keys, handcuffs and gun holsters are on display. However, there is no sign or explanation of whether these devices were used at this lock-up. Many objects on display are not original to the site and a staff member noted that these were likely donations from the community.

Objects are also created to convey a sense of authenticity. Though this next example overlaps with existential authenticity, here we return to the Historic Cornwall Jail at which a gallows was built in the yard in a spot where one had not previously been erected before. While hangings did take place elsewhere on the grounds, the original gallows were dismantled after every hanging, such that the actual relics of capital punishment at this site have long been disposed of.

Existential authenticity

A third type of authenticity those working in penal history museum staff attempt to foster is existential and corporeal in the sense that they try to cultivate exhibits and experiences for tourists to get a sense of what prison was or is currently like. As Wang (1999) notes, this form of existential authenticity often forces the tourist to contemplate mortality – their own and that of others. Existential authenticity includes consideration of bodily feelings, emotions, guilt and vengeance (Kim and Jamal, 2007; Steiner and Reisinger, 2006). A common way existential authenticity is staged is by allowing access to all or some of the prison cells located on the site. Sometimes, as is the case at the Cornwall and Albert County jails, the curation entails the preservation of graffiti and writing inside cell walls that were inscribed by prisoners (also see Wilson, 2008). In other cases, such as with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec whose Charles-Baillairgé Pavillon was the Quebec City prison in a previous life, paint has covered the inscriptions that may have been left behind by prisoners on the cell walls. The most important point, however, is that visitors are often encouraged to enter the cells and shut the door to ‘feel what being behind bars is like’ as one guide at the Ottawa Jail hostel exclaimed during a tour we participated in. At the Morrin Centre in Quebec City, which depicts imprisonment during the early nineteenth century in the area, the curator goes further by turning off the lights to create a sense of being locked in a small, dark space.

To convey the idea that imprisonment is brutal, some museums will allow tourists to not just look at torture and punishment contraptions, but also interact with them in some way. For example, at the Federal Penitentiary Museum in Kingston, Ontario, one can enter a ‘punishment box’ that has been restored and resembles a coffin to experience what behind confined in the smallest of spaces can feel like. On one occasion when we were conducting observations, a few visitors were laughing and taking pictures while making sad faces as they pretended to be disciplined for breaking institutional rules.

At the Federal Penitentiary Museum, one can also witness importation and creation strategies, with a replica of a cramped cell from Kingston Penitentiary with nothing more than a bed from the nineteenth century is juxtaposed against a single-cell found in Canadian federal penitentiaries today with a bunk-bed/desk combination, sink and toilet, and a shelving unit built by CORCAN, the Correctional Service of Canada’s prison labour corporation. A mannequin has been placed in the smaller cell to convey how little space prisoners once had. While visitors cannot enter these mock cells, around the corner one can look at a mirror covered with bars to get a sense of what one would look like through this kind of cell door (Walby and Piché, 2011).

A more extensive approach to manufacturing existential authenticity involves the creation of overnight stays inside prison walls. Such an experience is offered at The Old Prison in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. Former prisoners and staff members guide tourists around the site and interpret the different aspects of the building and the prison regime for tourists. They reflect on the pains of imprisonment. Some of what guides say is scripted. Tourists can then stay overnight and be locked in a cell. In the morning, they eat oatmeal from a tin cup. There is also a disjuncture here whereby the tourists are not subjected to the context of imprisonment and punishment, and the related power relations during their stay. They are not involuntarily locked-up and shuffled around the site to manage population flows or subject to a violent cell extraction should they fail to follow some protocol. Tourists are paying for an experience they know will end when they want it to. Even prisoner guides are no longer subject to the same deadly constraints. Without consequence or reprimand, they may embellish, exaggerate or simplify issues in the same way non-prisoner guides tend to. The prisoner guides are also now free to walk where they want in the hallways, make decisions about where to stand and how to stand, and have control over their bodies and selves in ways that they never enjoyed when the site was operational. Thus, while they may share genuine stories of doing time, from where they currently stand they are far removed from the original context that shaped their incarceration.

Narrative authenticity

Museum staff attempt to convey a fourth form of authenticity at their penal history sites through different use of narratives. Some of these narratives can be found in records that documented and shaped carceral life. For instance, in sites such as Science East in Fredericton, New Brunswick, that is housed in the building that used to be the York County Jail, one can find a preserved log book on the wall, lists of prisoners and newspaper articles that tell the story of incarceration in that area of the country.

Narrative authenticity is also conveyed through the plethora of signs one finds in penal history museums that signal to visitors what part of the former carceral site they find themselves in. One example is the combination of original and newly added signs found in L’Orignal Old Jail in eastern Ontario that help visitors situate themselves in the diversity of spaces one encounters, including the segregation cell. Placards, such as the ones found in penal history sites in Ottawa and Kingston, also depict incarceration policies and practices said to be relics of the past such as hard labour.

In some Canadian penal history museums, there are more elaborate attempts to expose visitors to the realities of incarceration through simulated or re-enacted scenes of prison life. Narratives are conveyed in plays or performance art pieces at these sites. At Peel Art Gallery Museum in Ontario, a play, based on Stefan Swyrda who was hanged for murder without having a translator at his trial, is held in the courtroom where the original proceedings took place in 1909. At Charlotte County in New Brunswick, ‘Live the Experience’ events are available for visitors in which mock trials are held to recreate common charges (for instance, what would happen if you stole a loaf of bread). And on the grounds of the Old Goderich Jail, which is now the Huron County Museum, summer plays and daily performances going by the title ‘Behind the Bars’ are staged that depict the historical conditions of confinement at the site, as well as the lives of the people who worked there. The ‘Behind the Bars’ series involves 18 historic characters that make the entire grounds of the old jail their stage. These cases exemplify narratives that have been created to represent imprisonment and prisoners.

A final significant issue is that such narratives are relational insofar as the narratives that guides and other penal history museum staff provide depend on what the tourists do with such information. Narratives conveyed by tour guides have implications for understanding authenticity too and while many of our study participants laid claim to authentic discourses that we explore elsewhere, a minority of them are sceptical of the idea that they provide an authentic experience to tourists. For example, at the Granum Old Jail and Museum in Granum, Alberta, two volunteer tour guides who had previously worked in the penal system raised questions about the tours they provided and whether these tours reflected what they had come across during their professional careers. One respondent indicated,

I think it’s been more of an entertainment factor rather than an educational factor … we have the school children come down … you try to explain to them what it was like in those days to be a prisoner. Not long after that, they’re going through the museum and the students take out their iPods.

The other respondent noted, ‘what they’re showing here is not prisons … we might be causing a disservice. A sanitizing. “Stand there and get your photograph taken and everyone is laughing”’. He then went on to indicate that he would prefer if students learned about prisons and jails from tours of operational facilities, although questions have been raised about the ethics of that practice as well (see Piché and Walby, 2010). Nevertheless, the two volunteer guides noted that the tours in Granum focused more on entertainment and were not providing access to authentic prison experiences despite their efforts. These comments represent one of the few times our research team observed respondents who were fully open and concerned about the staging of authenticity.

Discussion and conclusion

As Staples (1995) notes, a good deal of work goes into bringing heritage buildings and sites back to life once they cease to serve their original purposes. We have examined how carceral stage setting occurs at decommissioned penal sites and how messages are conveyed about the realities of incarceration. The staging of authenticity is a persistent aspect of curation that occurs across penal history museums, including small and rural decommissioned jails and lock-ups, not just defunct penitentiaries and prisons that are the focus of most academic inquiries. We follow Reisinger and Steiner (2006) in suggesting that objective authenticity ‘provides no solid foundation on which to build tourism research and advance thinking’ (p. 81). However, we have argued that there is a continuum of staged authenticity involving different strategies of depicting authenticity at carceral sites. These settings offer unique opportunities for staging authenticity or carceral stage setting, given the presence of available architecture, relics and archival materials, whether original to the sites or not. There are also unique challenges insofar as punishment and imprisonment have never been just one thing to those who worked, lived and died in such carceral settings. The definition of the situation varies from prisoner to prisoner, prison worker to prison worker and there are crucial differences between prisoner and prison staff views of prison life.

Rather than conceptualize museum spaces as front or back stages to varying degrees, we have offered a conceptualization of staging that involves four strategies used by paid and unpaid staff to convey kinds of authenticity to tourists who frequent their places of work. Preservation denotes leaving the heritage aspects of the site alone, whereas creation connotes a blatant form of ‘making it up’. All four strategies involve staging the authentic. We have defined the four approaches to supplement and integrate work done by scholars who take different positions on the issue of authenticity in tourism literature. We have also shown how these strategies intersect with four types of authenticity (architectural and spatial, tactile and visual, existential and narrative) to contribute to existing dark and penal tourism research on authenticity.

Finally, we suggest that the practice of staging authenticity that penal museum staff engage in can obfuscate critical narratives regarding confinement and punishment in Canada. Carceral stage setting includes some parts of history and not others. Rarely is the imprisonment of Indigenous peoples mentioned, for instance, even in sites where jails or prisons infamously played a key role in colonialism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Canada, penal institutions are a key component of the federal government’s attempts at pacifying and controlling First Nations persons from coast to coast to coast (Martel et al., 2012). What is staged and allowed to remain in these tourist sites usually, although not always (see Fiander et al., forthcoming), excludes from view the colonial aspects of penality in Canada. As Waitt (2000) has argued, the staging and curation of tourism sites can silence alternative versions of history that may focus on more critical narratives such as racism and colonialism. Representations of prisoners in museum and cultural spaces are political insofar as these visions foster understandings of prisoners that support existing power relations and social institutions (McAlister, 2013; Mendel and Steinberg, 2011). The staging of authenticity not only makes meaning out of stone cold walls and steel bars, but can also contribute to the erasure of possible counter-narratives about imprisonment and punishment. Beyond further analysing the strategies for and forms of staged authenticity, future research should examine how staged authenticity introduces silences and blind spots in the historical record, as well as in material culture.

Footnotes

Funding

This study was produced as part of the Carceral Cultures (CC) research initiative () led by Justin Piché and Kevin Walby, which aims to generate knowledge about Canada’s culture of punishment that informs and gives meaning to related penal policies and practices. The project is funded by theSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number 430-2012-0447). We would like to thank CC research team members Ashley Chen, Jonathan Côté, Matthew Ferguson, Sarah Fiander, Catherine Giguère, Adina Ilea, Shanisse Kleuskens, Alex Luscombe, and Blair Wilkinson for their involvement in data production and analysis.

Notes

Author biographies

Kevin Walby is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg. He is co-editor of Brokering Access: Power, Politics, and Freedom of Information Process in Canada with M. Larsen (2012, UBC Press). He has also co-edited with R. Lippert Policing Cities: Urban Securitization and Regulation in a 21^st Century World (2013, Routledge) and Corporate Security in the 21^st Century: Theory and Practice in International Perspective (2014, Palgrave Macmillan). He is currently Co-managing Editor for the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons.

Justin Piché, is assistant professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa and was Co-managing Editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (). His research examines prison expansion and available policy alternatives, cultural representations of incarceration and punishment, public criminology and prisoner writing.

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