Living with the penal past: Memory, heritage and the lived experience of historic prisons

Prison tourism research into the memorialisation of historic spaces of incarceration has focused primarily on the experiences of visitors to decommissioned prisons and/or those presenting them as sites of memory. Historic sites that are still in operation as prisons have largely been overlooked. We address this research gap, drawing upon a large ESRC-funded project exploring the ‘persistence’ of Victorian-era prisons in the United Kingdom. We argue that although such operational sites are not being consciously memorialised for an external audience, there are still practices of preservation, interpretation and commemoration taking place within them. Incarcerated people and prison staff still encounter past lives and practices, albeit in more subtle and less curated ways than do conventional ‘prison tourists’. We show how those living and working in such historic prisons understand their institutional histories, and how these histories shape their lived experience. In so doing, we collapse the distance between research into prison tourism and the lived experience of contemporary carceral institutions.