Courting controversy
Museums face ethical and moral issues when putting on exhibitions about crime and justice, but it is possible to create sensitive displays
As objects, they are unmistakable: six looped ropes, displayed side by side. Once used for hanging criminals, their stories are easy to imagine, as are those whose executions, all for murder, they are associated with.
John Platts hanged in 1847; Mary Pearcey in 1890; Albert Milsom, William Seaman, Henry Fowler and Amelia Dyer six years later.
Reading about execution is one thing, see- ing objects associated with it is another. The six nooses are just one element of The Crime Museum Uncovered exhibition, which opened at the Museum of London last October.
The exhibition showcases previously unseen pieces from the Metropolitan Police’s original Black Museum, founded in the mid-1870s. Now referred to as the Crime Museum, the displays have only been open to members of the police and a few select individuals until now.
Since going on show at the Museum of London, objects have been viewed by hundreds of visitors every day, with London mayor Boris Johnson announcing plans last month for a permanent public Policing and Crime Museum to unite the Met’s collections of artefacts, currently scattered in venues across London.
The Museum of London show, with its objects and educational videos, is just one of many displays on crime and justice.
From Essex Police Museum, which tells the stories of fallen police officers, to the simulated jail cells of Ripon’s Prison & Police Museum, and Nottingham’s Galleries of Justice Museum, currently undergoing significant expansion, to London’s Clink Prison Museum, there is a clear market for exhibits of this nature.
But as the recent controversy surrounding east London’s Jack the Ripper Museum has shown, if handled without full preparation for their reception, they can backfire.
So what are the issues that museums need to consider when developing displays about crime? How does one balance the feelings of victims with truthful storytelling, attract visitors and avoid sensationalism, as well as engage in complex ideas about justice and citizenship?
“It’s dependent on the individual pieces,” says Jackie Keily, the co-curator of The Crime Museum Uncovered. “With the ropes, for example, we’ve had a lot of com- ments from people saying they find them challenging or shocking. That’s the point of that display – to remind people about the reality of capital punishment.”
Though Keily maintains that people’s responses vary widely, the museum took clear ethical steps when choosing exhibits. There are no victims’ stories told later than 1975 in order to show respect to victims’ relatives. There are no human remains on show, for example – though specimens do exist within the Met’s collection – because that would not be in particularly good taste, says Keily.
“We didn’t feel that any of the criminal investigations displayed in the exhibition necessitated the inclusion of human remains; it didn’t feel appropriate,” she says. “The display of human remains that are less than 100 years old would also have required a licence, in line with the 2004 Human Tissue Act.”
A consultation process involved discussions within the museum, as well as with exhibition partners, the Met Police and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac), along with the London Policing Ethics Panel, whose members include Professor Leif Wenar, the chair of philosophy and law at King’s College, London. Where fitting, and possible, victims’ families were also informed – some chose not to allow objects to go on show.
Warning signs indicate the inclusion of distressing content, including mocked-up versions of explosives from the London 7/7 terror attacks. The museum recommends that children under 16 should not visit unaccompanied.
“We feel this exhibition is testing the water to some extent,” Keily says. “It’s a challenging collection of material so the issue of how to display it, and whether it should even be on view to the public, is never going to be an easy one. That’s not to say the decisions we’ve made are wrong or right, but it opens up a debate about displaying such material.”
With its largely school-age audience and policing subject matter, Essex’s Police Museum has its own challenges. Like the Museum of London, it has a cut-off period for display, and does not portray any crimes that happened after the 1970s, says its curator, Becky Wash.
Certain kinds of privileged information, including charge sheets, remain locked away from the public. Because of the small number of stories featured, including the 1927 murder of police constable George Gutteridge, the museum can carefully manage victims’ relatives and visitors’ experiences. “I still keep in touch with Gutteridge’s grandson, from whom we normally get permission for things,” Wash says.
“We don’t want children getting too excited about guns. We look at the consequences of crime, and focus heavily on the police work.”
Essentially, this method of display helps counteract the excesses of the media and fic- tion. “We are fortunate – children in London see it differently to those in Essex,” Wash says. “Television has a lot to answer for. We don’t have a knife problem and our police officers don’t carry guns like they do in America.”
The displays offer the opportunity to correct misunderstandings about violence, Wash adds.
To interpret methodical police work and bureaucratic judicial processes, displays must combine context with ways to engage visitors. The Galleries of Justice Museum’s redevelopment will put more of its collection on display and allow greater hands-on interaction with exhibits.
At present, among other activities, visitors view costume interpreters re-enacting court processes in the museum’s courtroom and explore an on-site historic prison. With the redevelopment, a new crime gallery will showcase historic and current theories on why people commit crime: nature or nurture, social or economic factors, peer pressure or alcoholism.
Similar to the Museum of London, different forms of crime will be explored, ranging from the obsolete, such as homosexuality, to modern offences, such as cybercrime. There will be displays on crime in culture, as well as more detailed information on legal roles.
“That’s something that we’ve not done before,” says Bev Baker, the senior curator and archivist. “Our visitors should go away with a more rounded knowledge of the legal process and the personnel involved in mak- ing decisions on who’s guilty and who’s innocent. We’ve got to keep that fine balance between being entertaining, engaging, informative and educational.”
With family groups, education should proceed with a light touch, Baker adds.
As Britain changes, so do its mores and definitions. Justice, as defined in the context of law and order, is just one set of rules. As recent discussions over social justice in the museum sector and media demonstrate, notions of fairness and ethics may run in opposition or parallel to official government policies.
“In the past it would have been inconceiv- able that a museum could be an active player in highlighting social issues,” says James Etherington, the director of Ripon Museums Trust, which oversees the Workhouse Museum and Garden, the Prison Police Museum and the Courthouse Museum.
“We have had discussions about what route to take,” he says. “Our displays and interpretation reflect a more traditional model, placing history in context, with little or no engagement with how these issues are currently playing out. We have discussed moving towards a more active contribution to contemporary debates, or making an active contribution to delivering services in partnership with social and healthcare providers to help alleviate the symptoms of poverty and social deprivation.”
Jon Alexander, the founder of the New Citizenship Project, a social innovation organisation, advocates redefining museums’ function within this context.
“We live in a time where the tools and technologies are available to us, where the interaction with the idea of justice doesn’t have to be a passive ‘learn, digest and leave’; it can be a more active engagement,” Alexander says.
“The thing about concepts as abstract as justice is that they are always in a cultural context. They mean something different depending on where you are or the time you’re in. Because it’s changing at the edges and it would be an interesting area for a museum to penetrate in a different way.”
Alexander points to Harvard University’s Michael Sandel, a professor whose course on justice has 15,000 students enrolled and was the first Harvard course to be made freely available online. It asks questions such as “Is torture ever justified?” and “Would you steal a drug that your child needs to survive?” Alexander adds: “I would love to see what a place-based embod- iment of that would look like.”
At the Museum of London, the show’s organisers hope people take away not just the excesses of famed homicidal criminals such as the Kray twins, but also the numer- ous, often overlooked fates of victims and their relevance today.
“Emily Barrow walked to work one morning in 1902, having left her violent common-law husband a few days before,” reads the conclusion to The Crime Museum Uncovered’s accompanying book. “She probably didn’t see him following her until it was too late... she died on the street in Shadwell, another victim of ‘domestic abuse’... the truth is that her story could have happened yesterday, today or tomor- row, anywhere around the world. And this is why we need a crime museum, so that we remember.”
Rob Sharp is a freelance journalist
Behind bars
The Clink Prison Museum, close to London’s South Bank, explores the circumstances surrounding the eponymous prison that operated on the site between the 12th and 18th centuries.
Tours for school-age visitors focus on issues such as the importance of religion to inmates and the conditions they lived in.
“The important thing about history and stories in general is that it’s not about people like them, it’s about people like us,” says Alex Lyon, a tour guide and researcher.
“It’s less about looking at the past and saying, ‘Weren’t we cruel then?’ It’s more about how people have stepped outside the rules and what happened to them. And how the rules have changed.”
Regarding his tour guiding style, Lyon says: “It’s about finding clarity to tell this kind of story. They were ordinary people being tortured. We may think we have moved on a long way but there are still countries in the world where people are tortured... As a specialist you need to be able to look yourself in the mirror in the morning and say, ‘Have I still got my integrity? Am I still telling a truthful story?’ Truth is important in history.”
Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast, which operated between 1845 and 1996, functions in more politically difficult territory.
Tour guides read from a meticulously edited script as they show visitors around the cells, wings and hospital of what was, until recently, a working prison, whose famous inmates included the Irish unionist Ian Paisley, Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness and the instigator of the 1981 IRA hunger strikes, Bobby Sands.
According to its website, the prison also aims to “set objectives for promoting social responsibility” as part of its operating ethos.
Age appropriate education programmes for Key Stage 2 pupils ensure schoolchildren are sensitively informed about the lives of some of the child prisoners who once occupied the prison. Today, italso serves as a meeting place for community groups.
John Platts hanged in 1847; Mary Pearcey in 1890; Albert Milsom, William Seaman, Henry Fowler and Amelia Dyer six years later.
Reading about execution is one thing, see- ing objects associated with it is another. The six nooses are just one element of The Crime Museum Uncovered exhibition, which opened at the Museum of London last October.
The exhibition showcases previously unseen pieces from the Metropolitan Police’s original Black Museum, founded in the mid-1870s. Now referred to as the Crime Museum, the displays have only been open to members of the police and a few select individuals until now.
Since going on show at the Museum of London, objects have been viewed by hundreds of visitors every day, with London mayor Boris Johnson announcing plans last month for a permanent public Policing and Crime Museum to unite the Met’s collections of artefacts, currently scattered in venues across London.
The Museum of London show, with its objects and educational videos, is just one of many displays on crime and justice.
From Essex Police Museum, which tells the stories of fallen police officers, to the simulated jail cells of Ripon’s Prison & Police Museum, and Nottingham’s Galleries of Justice Museum, currently undergoing significant expansion, to London’s Clink Prison Museum, there is a clear market for exhibits of this nature.
But as the recent controversy surrounding east London’s Jack the Ripper Museum has shown, if handled without full preparation for their reception, they can backfire.
So what are the issues that museums need to consider when developing displays about crime? How does one balance the feelings of victims with truthful storytelling, attract visitors and avoid sensationalism, as well as engage in complex ideas about justice and citizenship?
“It’s dependent on the individual pieces,” says Jackie Keily, the co-curator of The Crime Museum Uncovered. “With the ropes, for example, we’ve had a lot of com- ments from people saying they find them challenging or shocking. That’s the point of that display – to remind people about the reality of capital punishment.”
Though Keily maintains that people’s responses vary widely, the museum took clear ethical steps when choosing exhibits. There are no victims’ stories told later than 1975 in order to show respect to victims’ relatives. There are no human remains on show, for example – though specimens do exist within the Met’s collection – because that would not be in particularly good taste, says Keily.
“We didn’t feel that any of the criminal investigations displayed in the exhibition necessitated the inclusion of human remains; it didn’t feel appropriate,” she says. “The display of human remains that are less than 100 years old would also have required a licence, in line with the 2004 Human Tissue Act.”
A consultation process involved discussions within the museum, as well as with exhibition partners, the Met Police and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac), along with the London Policing Ethics Panel, whose members include Professor Leif Wenar, the chair of philosophy and law at King’s College, London. Where fitting, and possible, victims’ families were also informed – some chose not to allow objects to go on show.
Warning signs indicate the inclusion of distressing content, including mocked-up versions of explosives from the London 7/7 terror attacks. The museum recommends that children under 16 should not visit unaccompanied.
“We feel this exhibition is testing the water to some extent,” Keily says. “It’s a challenging collection of material so the issue of how to display it, and whether it should even be on view to the public, is never going to be an easy one. That’s not to say the decisions we’ve made are wrong or right, but it opens up a debate about displaying such material.”
With its largely school-age audience and policing subject matter, Essex’s Police Museum has its own challenges. Like the Museum of London, it has a cut-off period for display, and does not portray any crimes that happened after the 1970s, says its curator, Becky Wash.
Certain kinds of privileged information, including charge sheets, remain locked away from the public. Because of the small number of stories featured, including the 1927 murder of police constable George Gutteridge, the museum can carefully manage victims’ relatives and visitors’ experiences. “I still keep in touch with Gutteridge’s grandson, from whom we normally get permission for things,” Wash says.
“We don’t want children getting too excited about guns. We look at the consequences of crime, and focus heavily on the police work.”
Essentially, this method of display helps counteract the excesses of the media and fic- tion. “We are fortunate – children in London see it differently to those in Essex,” Wash says. “Television has a lot to answer for. We don’t have a knife problem and our police officers don’t carry guns like they do in America.”
The displays offer the opportunity to correct misunderstandings about violence, Wash adds.
To interpret methodical police work and bureaucratic judicial processes, displays must combine context with ways to engage visitors. The Galleries of Justice Museum’s redevelopment will put more of its collection on display and allow greater hands-on interaction with exhibits.
At present, among other activities, visitors view costume interpreters re-enacting court processes in the museum’s courtroom and explore an on-site historic prison. With the redevelopment, a new crime gallery will showcase historic and current theories on why people commit crime: nature or nurture, social or economic factors, peer pressure or alcoholism.
Similar to the Museum of London, different forms of crime will be explored, ranging from the obsolete, such as homosexuality, to modern offences, such as cybercrime. There will be displays on crime in culture, as well as more detailed information on legal roles.
“That’s something that we’ve not done before,” says Bev Baker, the senior curator and archivist. “Our visitors should go away with a more rounded knowledge of the legal process and the personnel involved in mak- ing decisions on who’s guilty and who’s innocent. We’ve got to keep that fine balance between being entertaining, engaging, informative and educational.”
With family groups, education should proceed with a light touch, Baker adds.
As Britain changes, so do its mores and definitions. Justice, as defined in the context of law and order, is just one set of rules. As recent discussions over social justice in the museum sector and media demonstrate, notions of fairness and ethics may run in opposition or parallel to official government policies.
“In the past it would have been inconceiv- able that a museum could be an active player in highlighting social issues,” says James Etherington, the director of Ripon Museums Trust, which oversees the Workhouse Museum and Garden, the Prison Police Museum and the Courthouse Museum.
“We have had discussions about what route to take,” he says. “Our displays and interpretation reflect a more traditional model, placing history in context, with little or no engagement with how these issues are currently playing out. We have discussed moving towards a more active contribution to contemporary debates, or making an active contribution to delivering services in partnership with social and healthcare providers to help alleviate the symptoms of poverty and social deprivation.”
Jon Alexander, the founder of the New Citizenship Project, a social innovation organisation, advocates redefining museums’ function within this context.
“We live in a time where the tools and technologies are available to us, where the interaction with the idea of justice doesn’t have to be a passive ‘learn, digest and leave’; it can be a more active engagement,” Alexander says.
“The thing about concepts as abstract as justice is that they are always in a cultural context. They mean something different depending on where you are or the time you’re in. Because it’s changing at the edges and it would be an interesting area for a museum to penetrate in a different way.”
Alexander points to Harvard University’s Michael Sandel, a professor whose course on justice has 15,000 students enrolled and was the first Harvard course to be made freely available online. It asks questions such as “Is torture ever justified?” and “Would you steal a drug that your child needs to survive?” Alexander adds: “I would love to see what a place-based embod- iment of that would look like.”
At the Museum of London, the show’s organisers hope people take away not just the excesses of famed homicidal criminals such as the Kray twins, but also the numer- ous, often overlooked fates of victims and their relevance today.
“Emily Barrow walked to work one morning in 1902, having left her violent common-law husband a few days before,” reads the conclusion to The Crime Museum Uncovered’s accompanying book. “She probably didn’t see him following her until it was too late... she died on the street in Shadwell, another victim of ‘domestic abuse’... the truth is that her story could have happened yesterday, today or tomor- row, anywhere around the world. And this is why we need a crime museum, so that we remember.”
Rob Sharp is a freelance journalist
Behind bars
The Clink Prison Museum, close to London’s South Bank, explores the circumstances surrounding the eponymous prison that operated on the site between the 12th and 18th centuries.
Tours for school-age visitors focus on issues such as the importance of religion to inmates and the conditions they lived in.
“The important thing about history and stories in general is that it’s not about people like them, it’s about people like us,” says Alex Lyon, a tour guide and researcher.
“It’s less about looking at the past and saying, ‘Weren’t we cruel then?’ It’s more about how people have stepped outside the rules and what happened to them. And how the rules have changed.”
Regarding his tour guiding style, Lyon says: “It’s about finding clarity to tell this kind of story. They were ordinary people being tortured. We may think we have moved on a long way but there are still countries in the world where people are tortured... As a specialist you need to be able to look yourself in the mirror in the morning and say, ‘Have I still got my integrity? Am I still telling a truthful story?’ Truth is important in history.”
Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast, which operated between 1845 and 1996, functions in more politically difficult territory.
Tour guides read from a meticulously edited script as they show visitors around the cells, wings and hospital of what was, until recently, a working prison, whose famous inmates included the Irish unionist Ian Paisley, Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness and the instigator of the 1981 IRA hunger strikes, Bobby Sands.
According to its website, the prison also aims to “set objectives for promoting social responsibility” as part of its operating ethos.
Age appropriate education programmes for Key Stage 2 pupils ensure schoolchildren are sensitively informed about the lives of some of the child prisoners who once occupied the prison. Today, italso serves as a meeting place for community groups.