Prisons and Punishment in Texas

Abstract

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.

Museum ethnography: Researching punishment museums as environments of narrativity

“…With any ethnography, deciding what should be considered significant will be guided by the questions and aims that drive the research. In my own project, I sought to examine the extent to which Texan punishment stories employed the cultural scripts of fear, vengeance and closure to justify the Texan commitment to the death penalty and other forms of harsh justice (see Thurston, 2016 for a full discussion). As such, I wanted to examine how inmates were characterised, how the purpose of punishment was portrayed and, more specifically, how Texas – as a cultural collective – narrated (and justified) its own relationship with harsh punishment.…”

“…More specifically, the museum put forward a particular narrative framework within which to interpret Texan punishment. By juxtaposing the past and the present, the old against the new, the electric chair is characterised as an artefact of a bygone era, while lethal injection becomes synonymous with a more modern, more ‘civilised’ way of punishing (see Thurston, 2016, in press for a full discussion).…”

“…The tours, from which the quotes are taken, were guided by serving police officers in the Beaumont Police and Jail Cells Museum and the Old Eastland County Jail House Museum. It is outside the scope of this article to offer a full discussion about the characterisation of the inmate within the tours/museums (see Thurston, 2016); however, when speaking about prisoners, more often than not, the guides tended to evoke the character of a ‘dangerous criminal’ (Figures 8 to 10):They’d thrash around in here, the crazy ones; clawing and stuff. They’re the most dangerous in my opinion, because they were just so unpredictable you know?…”

“…The museum removes these stories of rehabilitation from wider debates about the appropriateness of execution or the effectiveness of long sentences by avoiding them entirely. As I discuss at length elsewhere (Thurston, 2016), visitors are invited to imagine the inmate as capable of reform, but they are simultaneously invited to support their punishment due to its retributive features.…”

“…As such, with no experience of curatorship studies, starting a museum analysis as a researcher (experienced or otherwise) can be a somewhat daunting endeavour. What follows, then, is an explanation of the process that I – as a researcher interested in punishment – went through in order to write the book Prisons and Punishment in Texas: Culture, History and Museological Representation (Thurston, 2016). Drawing from examples discussed in the book, this article de-mystifies the process of criminological museum data collection and analysis.…”