“Can you make it out alive?” Investigating Penal Imaginaries at Forts, Sanitaria, Asylums, and Segregated Schools

Abstract

We draw from literature on penal imaginaries to examine representations at fright nights and other staged cultural scenes from across Canada and the United States that reproduce justifications for imprisonment and punishment. Based on an analysis of online content and news coverage of fright nights organized at forts, sanitoria, psychiatric institutions/asylums, and segregated schools, we demonstrate that these displays mobilize stereotypes and shame to denigrate prisoners and naturalize imprisonment. Moreover, we show that these displays invoke health tropes concerning contagion to intensify fears regarding prisoners by portraying them as a threat to the social body, further rationalizing the existence of human caging as a means of addressing social unease and anxieties. Relying on ideas of risk and contamination, this penal imaginary reproduces punitive ideas that normalize the deprivation of liberty including in (COVID-19) pandemic times. We conclude by discussing the significance of our findings for the study of penal imaginaries and penal spectatorship. well as their representations on screen and other cultural sites (Brown, 2009). The process of representing punishment for profit in ways that are often demeaning to prisoners is common at prison museums (Walby & Piché, 2015). Infatuation with penality extends to fright nights held at forts, jail and bail fundraisers held by nonprofit organizations, and other kinds of Halloween seasonal events meant to entertain and enthral. We define fright nights as seasonal horror themed events staged at night, while a jail and bail is an event where volunteers are "jailed" and supporters make donations for their "bail." Such events continue and take on new meaning during the COVID-19 pandemic era, with continued alarm over containing "risk," which we address in the conclusion of the paper.Tourism and heritage managers are often concerned with the views of visitors (Devine, 2016), and may take steps to appease them, including by adjusting content or marketing them to be more entertaining, but not necessarily more educational.Museums and tourist sites often put artifacts on display, which draws the tourist gaze toward them, while stripping the objects of context (Ott et al., 2011). Digital displays and communications are a part of the new world of tourism and museums (Webmoor, 2008). Beyond professional curation, there are many amateur displays organized by a

Decolonizing Research on the Carceral in Canadian Political Science

“…Since the early settlement (1763–1867) and nation-building (1867–1910) periods, carceral institutions of policing, courts and prisons have been used to suppress Indigenous political action and consolidate the nation (Chartrand, 2019). Forts—early sites of military establishment, resource extraction, and settlement—were places of initial confinement and policing (Mussell et al, 2021). Treaty 1, the first of the numbered treaties, was negotiated in the midst of the Lower Fort Garry prison in 1871 14 .…”