Prison Heritage and the Ethics of Public Engagement

Prison Heritage and the Ethics of Public Engagement Dr Maryse Tennant, Senior Lecturer, Canterbury Christ Church University @Maryse. Tennant #canterburyprison maryse. tennant@canterbury. ac. uk

Interpretation at penal heritage sites problematic and in need of refinement (see, for example, Garton-Smith, 2000; Wilson, 2008; Walby and Pichet, 2011; Gould, 2014; Welch, 2015, Hodgkinson and Urquhart, 2017) Prison museums are widely recognized as having the potential to enable the public to reflect on the use of imprisonment in contemporary society, although often they fail to do this (Turner and Peters, 2015, Hodgkinson and Urquhart, 2017 a, Wilson et al. , 2017: 5). The relationship between the past and the present is often seen as a key element in this, limiting the capacity of prison museums to enable and informed and critical consideration of the contemporary prison (Wilson, 2008: 44 -5, Turner and Peters, 2015)

Rising prison populations in recent years reflect “a moral and political choice … which we as members of society implicitly condone” (Scott and Codd, 2010: 1)

Board on Super Prisons at the National Justice Museum The entrance to the Clink Prison Museum

There is a need for “more ethical, multi-perspective and politically diverse interpretation within prison museums”(Barton and Brown, 2015: 237)

Dissonant Heritage Dissonance relates to a lack of agreement and consistency as to the meaning of heritage (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000: 24). Dissonance forms because heritage is produced through interpretation and selection in a context where multiple meanings are possible (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). Prison heritage has multiple meanings that shift over time, and so dissonance is clearly of relevance for understanding penal sites more generally (Strange and Kempa, 2003: 388). Its presence is more subtle there, however, and also more complex because crime itself is inherently dissonant.

As Brown (2009: 9) reminds us, “punishment is always a narrative about a chain of pain” occurring: “against the backdrop of structural conditions of poverty and vast race and class inequalities, containing within it an immense number of narratives of pain and abuse, where perpetrators and victims bleed together”. The “useablity” of atrocity as heritage is greater when victims are clearly not complicit and perpetrators are “unambiguously identifiable” (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996: 104 -5) Rock (1988): the role of victims and offenders “may be reversed, and reversed more than once”.

“All heritage is someone’s heritage and, therefore, logically not someone else’s” (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996: 6, 21) But whose heritage is the prison?

G’s mother had died in 1945 when he was just five and he was cared for by his maternal grandmother until his father remarried K two years later. She was younger than her husband they went on to have two of their own sons. On the evening of January 28 th 1958, aged just 17, G attacked K, assaulting her both physically and sexually, with the result that she died of her injuries. He then took a fairly large quantity of aspirin but was sick. After this he decided to hand himself in to the nearest police station where he was charged and remanded in custody at Canterbury prison. Graham was eventually convicted for manslaughter rather than murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Whilst in prison G confessed to both staff and his father that he had previously had sexual relations with his step-mother and that when she tried again to instigate sex it was this that prompted his attack. He was released after two years on 29 th August 1960 and returned to live with his father, his new step-mother and his two half brothers. G His step-mother His father His half brothers (the children of his victim) His new step-mother His maternal grandmother His step-mother’s parents

17 th February 1958 Dear Gran, Many thanks for your letter and chewing gum. They wouldn’t let me have it though, pity because I love a bit of gum to chew. … Went to court this morning and was remanded again until next Monday (24 th). I saw dad before I actually went to the court-room. He’s bearing up very well indeed, but said that poor little D hasn’t been too well for the last week. Keeps asking for his mum. Poor little devil, if only I had stopped to think about him, I’d never have done what I did. I don’t care what happens to me at all. I’ve done something terrible and I’m willing to take the punishment Gran. But the worst punishment I’ll ever have is knowing what I’ve done to Pop and the kids.

Letter from G’s maternal grandmother to the prison dated 13 th October 1958:

Statement of G’s father to the police January 1958 Letter from G’s father to the Prison Commissioners dated 23 rd September 1958

Letter from G’s new step-mother to Wakefield prison dated 26 rh January 1960

Plan of the crime scene

Letter from K’s parents to the Home Office following G’s release dated 15 th November 1960

Some Tentative Conclusions Heritage is inevitable dissonant. So, too, are crime and punishment. Traditional heritage responses to dissonance “obscure the wider cultural and political contexts within which heritage both sits and serves (Smith, 2006: 82). And so our engagement with dissonance in relation to penal heritage needs to be braoder. This raises challenges for the interpretation of penal heritage and requires us to address further ethical questions. Multi-perspective interpretation may not be possible. Conversely embracing dissonance may provide a way of challenging contemporary perceptions which rest on strict binaries. The creative arts could provide ways of assisting to develop such interpretations.

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