Th is is a unique and innovative series, the fi rst of its kind dedicated entirely to prison scholarship. At a historical point in which the prison population has reached an all-time high, the series seeks to analyse the form, nature and consequences of incarceration and related forms of punishment. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology provides an important forum for burgeoning prison research across the world.
Like all museums, punishment museums and sites of penal tourism are inherently political and moral institutions, offering cultural memories of a collective past. As environments of narrativity, these are significant spaces in which the public 'learn' about the past and how it continues to inform the present. In line with recent studies about 'dark' tourist sites, this article argues that the crime/punishment museum and jail cell tour can -and should -be understood as an ethnographic opportunity for narrative analysis. Rather than focus on just the findings of such an analysis, this article seeks to provide a practical guide to data collection and analysis in the context of criminological museum research. Offering illustrative examples from a study of Texan sites of penal tourism, it demonstrates how the history of punishment -as represented in museums -is an important part of cultural identity more broadly, playing a significant role in how we conceptualise (in)justice, morality and the purpose of punishment. In short, this article discusses how we can evoke the ethnographic tradition within museum spaces in order to interrogate how crime and punishment are expressed through narratives, images, objects and symbols.
Museums tell us a great deal about punishment, both past and present. As storied spaces they 'remember' punishment through accounts of brutality and benevolence; condemnation and compassion; retribution and righteousness. Indeed, these tourist sites offer powerful narratives about crime, but they are also spaces which can problematize concepts such as 'justice', 'tolerance' and 'order'. This chapter will consider the stories Texas tells about the death penalty within the Texas Prison Museum. Drawing on a museum ethnography undertaken in the Lone Star State, it will outline and analyse various narrative features found within this Texan tourist site. More specifically though, this chapter will address the tensions found to be at work within the museum setting and consider how we might begin to explain these as 'counter-narratives' of Texan punishment. As this chapter will argue, museums offer a unique opportunity to understand how a collective narrates its own relationship with criminal justice; they are significant sites in which meanings are made and opinions formed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.