Escape to Prison
Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of California Press
Published:30th Jun '15
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The resurrection of former prisons as museums has caught the attention of tourists along with scholars interested in studying what is known as dark tourism. Unsurprisingly, due to their grim subject matter, prison museums tend to invert the Disneyland "experience, becoming the antithesis of the happiest place on earth." In Escape to Prison, the culmination of years of international research, noted criminologist Michael Welch explores ten prison museums on six continents, examining the complex interplay between culture and punishment. From Alcatraz to the Argentine Penitentiary, museums constructed on the former locations of surveillance, torture, colonial control, and even rehabilitation tell unique tales about the economic, political, religious, and scientific roots of each site's historical relationship to punishment.
"An invaluable critical contribution to the growth of cultural criminology and dark tourism literature." -- Lindsey L. Upton Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology "The book's importance lies in its contribution to dark tourism theory and its exploration of the human drive to gaze-not just at prisons, prisoners, and implements of punishment but also at the darkness of human suffering... Recommended." -- R. Price CHOICE connect "Escape to Prison is a stimulating work ... It will be a particularly useful volume as we expand our cultural analyses of punishment." Punishment & Society "Michael Welch's Escape to Prison brings a criminologist's focus to prison museums and the roles they play in constructing cultural understandings of crime and punishment. [His] criminological perspectives provides new tools to explore the interplay of public memory and public policy, and imagine alternatives." American Quarterly "An exemplary study of penal heritage... [provokes] harder questions about public complicity in the durability of the prison." British Journal of Criminology
ISBN: 9780520286160
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 18mm
Weight: unknown
304 pages