Three years ago, Kingston Penitentiary was decommissioned and briefly opened its doors to tourists to raise funds for the local United Way.

Hugely popular, tickets for the October 2013 “KP” tours quickly sold-out, generating more than $180,000 in 15 days. Wanting in on the action, the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) partnered with Habitat for Humanity to offer another block of tours in November 2013, with proceeds to go toward expanding the construction of affordable housing by federal prisoners in the name of “rehabilitation and reintegration.”

These tours also sold-out fast, fostering further debate in the Kingston-area about the potential for KP to become a major tourist attraction. This week, tickets went on sale for a new series of guided tours at KP led by students and supported by retired correction service employees. The tours are being sold by project partners — the City of Kingston, CSC and the St. Lawrence Parks Commission — as “a rare and unique opportunity to go behind the walls of Canada’s oldest and most notorious maximum security prison.”

Many from the Kingston-area and elsewhere are hoping to enter the facility, which opened in 1835. From late-June until the end of October, it is estimated that KP visitors will “pump more than 6 million dollars into the local economy.”

However, before waves of visitors enter KP, there are reasons to think critically about the cultural work that is performed in these sites.

First, the repurposing of past carceral spaces cannot be divorced from prison trends of the present. For instance, the closure of KP that has given rise to its new use occurred as the Government of Canada was expanding its capacity to imprison.

A similar phenomenon took place over the past quarter-century in many Ontario communities where older jails and prisons were closed as the provincial government built larger facilities. When such “carceral retasking” takes place, penal tourism sites often perform ideological work that positions punishment practices as part of the past, while advancing the notion that imprisonment today is more humane when in reality brutalities behind bars continue.

With few exceptions, the focus at these museums is on exceptional prisoners or prison incidents with less emphasis placed on the stark realities of the deprivation of liberty. Also glossed over is exactly what has led some to be incarcerated, including the social, economic, legal and political processes that criminalize some people, but not others.

Also, when captives are dehumanized, while captors are humanized in site displays and narratives, including those of tour guides, there is a risk of producing social distance between tourists and the incarcerated and solidarity with prison workers in ways that deepen public support for punitive approaches to responding to social conflicts and harms we call ‘crimes.’

Opportunities for empathy can be lost. This is especially poignant in cases where the role of the mass incarceration of indigenous peoples in Canada in maintaining colonialism goes unmentioned, foreclosing conversations that need to be had about how settlers and First Nations peoples can establish radically different relations premised on respect, rather than exclusion.

The historical and contemporary framing offered by many penal history sites often seeds the ground for tourists to derive pleasure based on the pains of prisoners.

Nowhere is this more evident than in penal tourism gift shops where “penal spectators” are invited to buy items such as “I spent 9 months on the inside” t-shirts for babies, handcuffs and the like that make light of human captivity, alongside items that pay tribute to carceral sites and workers. This commodification of punishment in the form of trinkets and tours of decommissioned prisons raises many questions, including whether turning a profit that is based on human suffering, whether in the past or present, is an ethical way to meet commercial and educational objectives.

When our research team participated in a 2013 tour of KP led by a former staff member, the focus was overwhelmingly on building architecture and operations, as well as incidents of prisoner violence (1971 KP riot), security breaches (escape by Ty Conn) and staff deaths (Officer William Wentworth, 1961).

It was the latter that captured the attention of visitors. Given what we have observed there and elsewhere, we are worried the new tours of KP will squander the opportunity that decommissioned carceral sites have to educate Canadians about the limits of, and problems with, using prisons to punish and warehouse those we criminalize.

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If past experience is repeated at KP, another opportunity will be lost to expose visitors to more effective, just, humane and less costly alternatives that exist beyond prison walls. Incorporating critical voices, including those of current and former prisoners, would be a way to start this work. Only then could those engaged in penal tourism truly be invited to ponder whether it is simply prison buildings of the past that are outmoded or the idea of imprisonment itself that is obsolete.