The polysemy of punishment memorialization: Dark tourism and Ontario's penal history museums

Contributing to debates about cultural representations of prisons and prisoners, as well as exploring the crossover between the dark tourism literature and cultural criminology, this article reflects on how penal museums in the province of Ontario, Canada, create and communicate meaning as it regards imprisonment and punishment. Drawing from field notes made after observations at penal museums located in central and eastern Ontario cities and towns, we contend that penal museum relics offer a polysemy of meaning to viewers, as critical, indifferent and punitive interpretations are possible. Based on analysis of tour guide narratives as well as penal relics, we explore how the process of memorialization in many of these museums is organized around the idea of penal reform, which positions imprisonment and punishment as remnants of the past and introduces a social distance between the punished and the penal spectator.