Captive audiences
Former prisons are proving to be a rich source of material for museums to tell stories of crime, punishment and justice, says Deborah Mulhearn
Shedding light on hidden histories has been a growing trend in recent years as museums attempt to tell new stories in their displays. Opening former prisons - extreme examples of worlds that are hidden from most people - presents rich opportunities for museums to tackle issues such as crime, punishment and justice through displays, exhibitions, events and learning programmes.
There are some high-profile examples of prison museums around the world, including Alcatraz Island in San Francisco and Robben Island Museum in Cape Town, where former South African president Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. In the UK, sites range from major tourist attractions such as the Tower of London to numerous town jails.
Whatever the size, former prisons do present challenges for those trying to interpret them. Sensitivity is needed to explain and interpret not only the historic significance of the buildings, many of which are listed, but also the stories of the people who passed through, suffered and often died there.
Long-established prison museums in the UK use a range of interpretative approaches, events and educational programmes. But the recent selling off of prisons by the government, largely to private sector developers, has produced several visitor attractions that offer a more sensationalised experience, prompting debate about how prison histories should be told.
Some sites combine commercial businesses with nods to the building's previous use. The former Oxford Prison is now a Malmaison hotel, with a small heritage centre. It offers guests the chance to sleep in converted cells or in a double room in the House of Correction building, adjacent to the main hotel and overlooking the former exercise yard.
City & Country works with Historic England - the public body that looks after England's historic environment - and local civic societies to restore the buildings they work with. The aim is to acknowledge the architectural significance of the prisons and their importance to local communities. But the bleak human histories can be challenging for a company that wants to sell homes.
"We don't obscure the difficult stories, but it's a question of how to manage them, and we consider this carefully," says a City & Country spokesperson. "Shepton Mallet, for example, has a fascinating history as the UK's oldest prison, and there will be a permanent public display in the former reception area, with photographs and a timeline curated by in-house historians."
The company ran into trouble recently, when human remains - most likely those of a hanged prisoner - were found on the site. Some campaigners wanted them to be left there and interpreted in some way; others wanted them disinterred and buried elsewhere. But all thought that they should not be ignored (see box).
Past versus present
Getting the balance right in terms of what stories are told about a former prison can be tricky. Placing too much emphasis on the distant past can obscure the more recent and difficult histories. And while people have always been fascinated by prisons as the repositories of wrongdoers and misfits, focusing on the lurid aspects of prison life can mean the reality of it is distorted.
"The spectrum of experience is broad and you often find layers of interpretation and exploitation at the same site, which can lead to bizarre juxtapositions," says Charles Forsdick, the James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool, who has researched and written about international penal heritage. "At Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast, they have Johnny Cash tribute acts, but also a sensitive and balanced handling of the prison's history."
"It's a reflection of the deregulated nature of the sector," he says. "Unlike in the US, prison museums in the UK often sensationalise the past without drawing attention to contemporary penal culture, and the economic exploitation of these sites means that the quantitative experience overbalances the qualitative. So it becomes more about the motivations of the visitors and how the heritage apparatus can manipulate emotions."
Prison buildings are dotted all over the UK and attitudes towards crime and punishment are deeply embedded in our society and culture. This provides opportunities for interesting approaches to interpreting the subject. The National Justice Museum is based at Nottingham's historic Shire Hall and County Gaol, where visitors can delve into the story of justice through time.
The museum has been a pioneer in its approach to interpretation to fulfil its aim to inspire people of all ages to become active citizens. This is done through engaging activities, exhibitions and educational programmes relating to law and justice.
Others have used an art-led approach to the subject. In 2016, the National Trust collaborated with the art commissioning body Artangel to run Inside, a project in the former Reading Gaol. This saw actors and writers read the works of its most celebrated inmate, the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, in the spartan setting of his prison cell.
The simple act of reading his poetry brought visitors face to face with his despair and was a powerful indictment of the contemporary prison system as much as the historic one. But this was a rare example of a more artistic and reflective intervention, and relied on the "celebrity inmate" element of the gaol's history, which not all sites have.
"Our trained volunteers work in pairs because they need support. It is emotional work and we have extensive debriefings. We want to focus on the unknown women, but on their prison experience rather than the crimes, so we avoid the salacious aspects. We are not seeking to be apologists - the women have committed crimes - but we allow them to tell their stories in their own voices."
Revealing the gory facts
Ripon Museums Trust runs three sites in the North Yorkshire city: the Workhouse Museum and Garden, the Courthouse Museum and the Prison & Police Museum. The trust is refurbishing galleries at the last site, which has provided an opportunity to tell more nuanced and coherent stories with a strong educational agenda.
"Hard evidence is often lacking for the stories of ordinary people, so plenty of interpretation is needed," says James Etherington, the director of Ripon Museums Trust. "We were originally the city lock-up, where people were held for being drunk and disorderly or before going to York Castle Prison, so we don't have the same gory history as some prison museums. We display stocks, thumbscrews and a birching stool for children, but the prison setting provides a context that these items would not have in a standalone gallery.
"We have a duty to not gloss over history - the bare facts need to be brought alive - otherwise people will not make the connections with modern-day crime and punishment," Etherington adds. "As a museum sector, we need to provide an alternative that enables visitors to explore the more serious side of the history."
Funding from Arts Council England's Creative Case for Diversity strand has meant the museum can link to oral histories and contemporary collecting. Etherington says this will allow it to more effectively weave themes of poverty, disability and gender into the stories of people in the prison.
"The museum had not been upgraded since 2004," Etherington says. "Before, we had rather blunt facts, conveying no sense of why visitors should care. In our refurbished transportation gallery, we follow the story of our celebrity prisoners, the Sinkler brothers, who were transported to Australia for poaching. We see the process through their eyes using newspaper transcripts of their trial, poaching traps and weaponry of the period, as well as generic photographs of prison hulks [ships used as prisons]."
There are also sensitivities to negotiate in these environments, such as when a visitor recognised his great grandfather in a series of photographs of arrested felons. "He asked us to take it down because his ancestor had been found not guilty," Etherington says. "We came to a compromise by showing the photograph with contemporary newspaper reports, which created another layer about how people's lives were affected."
Some prison museums choose to offer minimal interpretation and let the building tell the story. One example is Kilmainham Gaol Museum in Dublin, run by the Office of Public Works. A thorough and authentic slice of Irish history is told through the bare cells, the graffiti on the walls and the stark yet beautiful prison chapel where Irish nationalists Grace Gifford and Joseph Plunkett married hours before he was executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising.
Prison sites can have complex histories and different functions over the years, so it often makes sense to concentrate on -specific events. At Ely Museum in the Old Gaol, Cambridgeshire, a 13th-century prison with many later additions, the story focuses on the Littleport riots in 1816, which were triggered by rising unemployment and grain costs. Several men were hanged and others transported to Australia.
"We don't have many records so we focus on inspiring empathy by asking what it must have been like to be transported and the effect on those left behind," says Elie Hughes, the curator of Ely Museum. "We have done workshops with teenagers looking at the terrible conditions, but also run games based on the graffiti.”
As more former prisons become available for new uses, there will be further opportunities for museums and other heritage bodies to use them to address the subjects of crime, punishment and justice. And the public do seem to have an appetite for experiencing life behind bars - as long as their visit is only temporary.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer.
This year's Museums Association Conference & Exhibition will include free tours for delegates to Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast.
Dorchester Prison is a two-minute walk from the town's courthouse, from where prisoners would have taken the short route to start their sentence, or be held until transported out of the country or hanged. The Shire Hall Historic Courthouse Museum in Dorset, which reopened in April, offers a multimedia guide that tells the stories of four prisoners.
One of these is Martha Brown, an abused wife who murdered her husband and was hanged at the prison in 1856, and whose bones may have been found on the prison site during archaeological investigations by the heritage developer City & Country. Brown is reputed to be the inspiration for Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Hardy is known to have seen Brown's execution as a 16-year-old.
"We tell her story in a conventional way, but end with a contemporary reflection on domestic abuse, and relate her story to the new offence of coercive control in a relationship," says Anna Bright, the director of Shire Hall. "She was vilified in the press of the time and we look at how those cases would be treated today."
The other prisoners whose stories are told at the museum are the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were transported to Australia in 1834. "The social and employment conditions they faced have many echoes in today's gig economy, and we are able to use their story to look at social justice and human rights in a broader way," Bright says.
The stories are told in a nuanced and balanced way, avoiding sensationalism and acknowledging that prison life was part of the town's history, but not fetishising it.
There are some high-profile examples of prison museums around the world, including Alcatraz Island in San Francisco and Robben Island Museum in Cape Town, where former South African president Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. In the UK, sites range from major tourist attractions such as the Tower of London to numerous town jails.
Whatever the size, former prisons do present challenges for those trying to interpret them. Sensitivity is needed to explain and interpret not only the historic significance of the buildings, many of which are listed, but also the stories of the people who passed through, suffered and often died there.
Long-established prison museums in the UK use a range of interpretative approaches, events and educational programmes. But the recent selling off of prisons by the government, largely to private sector developers, has produced several visitor attractions that offer a more sensationalised experience, prompting debate about how prison histories should be told.
Some sites combine commercial businesses with nods to the building's previous use. The former Oxford Prison is now a Malmaison hotel, with a small heritage centre. It offers guests the chance to sleep in converted cells or in a double room in the House of Correction building, adjacent to the main hotel and overlooking the former exercise yard.
Other prisons sold to private sector developers operate as visitor attractions, with entertainment involving breakout days, lockdowns, zombie prisoners, ghost hunts and paranormal events. Jailhouse Tours operates HMP Shrewsbury, HMP Gloucester and HMP Shepton Mallet in Somerset.
Gloucester and Shepton Mallet are owned by the heritage developer City & Country, which has secured planning permission to convert the sites to residential use, along with Dorchester and Portsmouth prisons. An agreement with Jailhouse Tours allows them to be run as tourist attractions until redevelopment work starts.
City & Country works with Historic England - the public body that looks after England's historic environment - and local civic societies to restore the buildings they work with. The aim is to acknowledge the architectural significance of the prisons and their importance to local communities. But the bleak human histories can be challenging for a company that wants to sell homes.
"We don't obscure the difficult stories, but it's a question of how to manage them, and we consider this carefully," says a City & Country spokesperson. "Shepton Mallet, for example, has a fascinating history as the UK's oldest prison, and there will be a permanent public display in the former reception area, with photographs and a timeline curated by in-house historians."
The company ran into trouble recently, when human remains - most likely those of a hanged prisoner - were found on the site. Some campaigners wanted them to be left there and interpreted in some way; others wanted them disinterred and buried elsewhere. But all thought that they should not be ignored (see box).
Past versus present
Getting the balance right in terms of what stories are told about a former prison can be tricky. Placing too much emphasis on the distant past can obscure the more recent and difficult histories. And while people have always been fascinated by prisons as the repositories of wrongdoers and misfits, focusing on the lurid aspects of prison life can mean the reality of it is distorted.
"The spectrum of experience is broad and you often find layers of interpretation and exploitation at the same site, which can lead to bizarre juxtapositions," says Charles Forsdick, the James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool, who has researched and written about international penal heritage. "At Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast, they have Johnny Cash tribute acts, but also a sensitive and balanced handling of the prison's history."
The privately-run Crumlin Road Gaol, which attracts 200,000 visitors a year, traces the footsteps of prisoners from the governor's office through the different wings and restored cells to the condemned-man cell and execution chamber.
Fifteen of the 17 men executed there are still buried on the grounds, so it is also a memorial site. Despite, or perhaps because of, its history, the former prison is also a popular wedding venue and conference centre. Forsdick describes the heritage aspects of some of these prison sites as "penal exoticism".
"It's a reflection of the deregulated nature of the sector," he says. "Unlike in the US, prison museums in the UK often sensationalise the past without drawing attention to contemporary penal culture, and the economic exploitation of these sites means that the quantitative experience overbalances the qualitative. So it becomes more about the motivations of the visitors and how the heritage apparatus can manipulate emotions."
Prison buildings are dotted all over the UK and attitudes towards crime and punishment are deeply embedded in our society and culture. This provides opportunities for interesting approaches to interpreting the subject. The National Justice Museum is based at Nottingham's historic Shire Hall and County Gaol, where visitors can delve into the story of justice through time.
The museum has been a pioneer in its approach to interpretation to fulfil its aim to inspire people of all ages to become active citizens. This is done through engaging activities, exhibitions and educational programmes relating to law and justice.
Others have used an art-led approach to the subject. In 2016, the National Trust collaborated with the art commissioning body Artangel to run Inside, a project in the former Reading Gaol. This saw actors and writers read the works of its most celebrated inmate, the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, in the spartan setting of his prison cell.
The simple act of reading his poetry brought visitors face to face with his despair and was a powerful indictment of the contemporary prison system as much as the historic one. But this was a rare example of a more artistic and reflective intervention, and relied on the "celebrity inmate" element of the gaol's history, which not all sites have.
More traditional museum approaches can also be effective in interpreting prison history. Echoes of Holloway is an oral history project and exhibition (until 8 October) at Islington Museum in London that aims to record the stories of some of the women held at the now demolished Holloway prison in London.
"The closure was a major rupture and the stories are tough, often of addiction and domestic violence," says Roz Currie, the curator of Islington Museum, which is running the project in collaboration with the charity Holloway Prison Stories and Middlesex University.
"Our trained volunteers work in pairs because they need support. It is emotional work and we have extensive debriefings. We want to focus on the unknown women, but on their prison experience rather than the crimes, so we avoid the salacious aspects. We are not seeking to be apologists - the women have committed crimes - but we allow them to tell their stories in their own voices."
Revealing the gory facts
Ripon Museums Trust runs three sites in the North Yorkshire city: the Workhouse Museum and Garden, the Courthouse Museum and the Prison & Police Museum. The trust is refurbishing galleries at the last site, which has provided an opportunity to tell more nuanced and coherent stories with a strong educational agenda.
"Hard evidence is often lacking for the stories of ordinary people, so plenty of interpretation is needed," says James Etherington, the director of Ripon Museums Trust. "We were originally the city lock-up, where people were held for being drunk and disorderly or before going to York Castle Prison, so we don't have the same gory history as some prison museums. We display stocks, thumbscrews and a birching stool for children, but the prison setting provides a context that these items would not have in a standalone gallery.
"We have a duty to not gloss over history - the bare facts need to be brought alive - otherwise people will not make the connections with modern-day crime and punishment," Etherington adds. "As a museum sector, we need to provide an alternative that enables visitors to explore the more serious side of the history."
Funding from Arts Council England's Creative Case for Diversity strand has meant the museum can link to oral histories and contemporary collecting. Etherington says this will allow it to more effectively weave themes of poverty, disability and gender into the stories of people in the prison.
"The museum had not been upgraded since 2004," Etherington says. "Before, we had rather blunt facts, conveying no sense of why visitors should care. In our refurbished transportation gallery, we follow the story of our celebrity prisoners, the Sinkler brothers, who were transported to Australia for poaching. We see the process through their eyes using newspaper transcripts of their trial, poaching traps and weaponry of the period, as well as generic photographs of prison hulks [ships used as prisons]."
There are also sensitivities to negotiate in these environments, such as when a visitor recognised his great grandfather in a series of photographs of arrested felons. "He asked us to take it down because his ancestor had been found not guilty," Etherington says. "We came to a compromise by showing the photograph with contemporary newspaper reports, which created another layer about how people's lives were affected."
Some prison museums choose to offer minimal interpretation and let the building tell the story. One example is Kilmainham Gaol Museum in Dublin, run by the Office of Public Works. A thorough and authentic slice of Irish history is told through the bare cells, the graffiti on the walls and the stark yet beautiful prison chapel where Irish nationalists Grace Gifford and Joseph Plunkett married hours before he was executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising.
Prison sites can have complex histories and different functions over the years, so it often makes sense to concentrate on -specific events. At Ely Museum in the Old Gaol, Cambridgeshire, a 13th-century prison with many later additions, the story focuses on the Littleport riots in 1816, which were triggered by rising unemployment and grain costs. Several men were hanged and others transported to Australia.
"We don't have many records so we focus on inspiring empathy by asking what it must have been like to be transported and the effect on those left behind," says Elie Hughes, the curator of Ely Museum. "We have done workshops with teenagers looking at the terrible conditions, but also run games based on the graffiti.”
As more former prisons become available for new uses, there will be further opportunities for museums and other heritage bodies to use them to address the subjects of crime, punishment and justice. And the public do seem to have an appetite for experiencing life behind bars - as long as their visit is only temporary.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer.
This year's Museums Association Conference & Exhibition will include free tours for delegates to Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast.
Prison life in Dorset
Dorchester Prison is a two-minute walk from the town's courthouse, from where prisoners would have taken the short route to start their sentence, or be held until transported out of the country or hanged. The Shire Hall Historic Courthouse Museum in Dorset, which reopened in April, offers a multimedia guide that tells the stories of four prisoners.
One of these is Martha Brown, an abused wife who murdered her husband and was hanged at the prison in 1856, and whose bones may have been found on the prison site during archaeological investigations by the heritage developer City & Country. Brown is reputed to be the inspiration for Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Hardy is known to have seen Brown's execution as a 16-year-old.
"We tell her story in a conventional way, but end with a contemporary reflection on domestic abuse, and relate her story to the new offence of coercive control in a relationship," says Anna Bright, the director of Shire Hall. "She was vilified in the press of the time and we look at how those cases would be treated today."
The other prisoners whose stories are told at the museum are the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were transported to Australia in 1834. "The social and employment conditions they faced have many echoes in today's gig economy, and we are able to use their story to look at social justice and human rights in a broader way," Bright says.
The stories are told in a nuanced and balanced way, avoiding sensationalism and acknowledging that prison life was part of the town's history, but not fetishising it.
"Our aim is to create an immersive experience where visitors understand how it feels to be in a cold and claustrophobic prison cell, and how spine-chilling it is to walk from the cells to the dock to be sentenced," says Bright. "We are not shocking people for the sake of it - our approach is about increasing visitors' empathy while creating contemporary relevance."