PUNISHMENT ON DISPLAY: EXPLORING THE PHENOMENON OF PRISON TOURISM IN AN AGE OF MASS INCARCERATION

Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Dean, Erin

Area of Concentration

Anthropology

Abstract

The crisis of mass incarceration continues be one of the biggest civil rights concerns of the United States, who, despite making up only about 5% of the world’s population, houses close to 25% of the world’s prisoners. Considering that incarceration in America operates along both racial and classed lines, many US citizens who are not as directly affected by the penal system view themselves as removed from playing any role in the crisis, although that is far from true. In this project, I examine the role of penal tourism in the United States. I place prisons and prison tourism in their historical contexts, review the relevant literature, and discuss my own ethnographic findings from prison museums throughout the nation. I argue that penal tourism is often experienced in voyeuristic ways that further the othering of those associated with prisons and normalize the ways our society punishes, although it has the ability to foster solidarity between prison tourists and those affected by incarceration.

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