“Can you make it out alive?” Investigating Penal Imaginaries at Forts, Sanitaria, Asylums, and Segregated Schools

We draw from literature on penal imaginaries to examine representations at fright nights and other staged cultural scenes from across Canada and the United States that reproduce justifications for imprisonment and punishment. Based on an analysis of online content and news coverage of fright nights organized at forts, sanitoria, psychiatric institutions/asylums, and segregated schools, we demonstrate that these displays mobilize stereotypes and shame to denigrate prisoners and naturalize imprisonment. Moreover, we show that these displays invoke health tropes concerning contagion to intensify fears regarding prisoners by portraying them as a threat to the social body, further rationalizing the existence of human caging as a means of addressing social unease and anxieties. Relying on ideas of risk and contamination, this penal imaginary reproduces punitive ideas that normalize the deprivation of liberty including in (COVID-19) pandemic times. We conclude by discussing the significance of our findings for the study of penal imaginaries and penal spectatorship.


Issue 3
"Can you make it out alive?" Investigating Penal Imaginaries at Forts, Sanitaria, Asylums, and Segregated Schools 8 obscured not only at this site but others. There is a lack of acknowledgement of this history, while public site operators evoke themes of disease and invasion (e.g., escaped convicts in spaces they should not be) in entertainment activities.
The second type of site we examine are sanitoria, exploring Tranquille Sanitorium in Kamloops, British Columbia, which evokes continual othering of people living with infectious disease and mental health issues, and fosters a fear of both. This is of interest during the COVID-19 pandemic (as we discuss in the conclusion) where fear of disease and treatment of people exposed to the virus comes hand-in-hand with punitive isolation tactics.
Third, we examine asylums, which similar to sanitoria, engage in continual othering, playing into a fear of people living with mental health issues and disabilities. We explore how meanings of physical and mental health intertwine at the Pennhurst asylum in Spring City, Pennsylvania.
Lastly, we examine the Centreville, Maryland "Trap House," which is a former segregated school turned cultural centre where police participate in Halloween events evoking confinement. This example provides lessons on meanings that sustain the concurrent epidemics of overdose deaths and policing violence. Through an examination of these four different cultural sites we reveal the salience of penal imaginaries invoked in past sites of confinement and their role in legitimating the deployment of carceral power in the present.

Forts
Forts were built for military and trading (Voorhis, 1930), and have been used in advancing national mythologies about identity, citizenship, and Indigenous peoples (Donald, 2009). An example in Canada with a prison escape theme is Fort Henry (Kingston, Ontario), while examples in the United States include paranormal tours at Fort Delaware (Delaware) and haunted tours at Fort Leavenworth (Kansas). The prison break themed event at Lower Fort Garry, "Fright at the Fort: Prison Break," was held in 2015. The haunted tours continue each year, a place where tuberculosis patients were confined and prisoners jailed. Lower Fort Garry was built in 1830 and is located near Winnipeg, the site of the Red River Rebellion (1869-70), an uprising by Métis led by Louis Riel, against the transfer of the territory of Rupert's Land to the Dominion of Canada (Andersen, 2014 This is a glowing account of history for a space associated with death and suffering. The fort has been groomed into a "marquee" heritage tourist attraction where accounts of history are generic, exaggerated and misleading (Coutts, 2016). At this site, Indigenous history is "essentially grafted onto site interpretation and site spectacle" (Coutts, 2016, p. 12). The ongoing colonial violence of erasure tied to the state-run fort is not fully discussed in portrayals of the site, nor in the haunted tours.
Instead, the penal imaginaries constructed as official discourse (McNeill, 2019) mobilize tropes of contagion and risk to convey a threat of the Other seated in colonial understandings (Sargent & Larchanche, 2014;Kinzelback, 2006).

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suffer from tuberculosis. Indigenous people are put at a higher risk (Gallant et al., 2017), especially those subjected to substandard housing and healthcare (Patterson et al., 2018;Patel et al., 2017). Indigenous people made up approximately five percent of the total Canadian population in 2015, but accounted for 17 percent (281/1,639) of all reported tuberculosis cases (Gallant et al., 2017). Similarly, staff share that they have heard of historical instances of "people painfully freezing to death in the winter along the banks of the river, and that someone in the town was allegedly a violent serial scalper" (Rousseau, 2015), yet do not situate these instances of violence in relation to ongoing colonialism. Indigenous people still freeze to death in the prairies when sent on "starlight tours" by police (Razack, 2015(Razack, , 2014, and there are thousands of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) (National Inquiry, 2019).
"Starlight tours" refer to police picking up Indigenous people and driving them outside city limits. In the winter this can prove lethal (Razack, 2015, p. 173). Such omissions at the site create social distance between the confined and the penal spectator (Brown, 2017), and operate to make imprisonment appear natural and necessary (Calathes, 2017) to keep those who purportedly represent "risk" isolated far away.
An important layer of the prison-break haunted tours at Lower Fort Garry is the exploitation of fear vis-à-vis the "ill" or "deviant" people escaping confinement and the heroism of police in creating order. At the entrance of one house, named "Trial and Horror," "a woman in a rocking chair yelled something akin to 'they'll get you!' and 'they say I'm crazy?'" -the implication being that prisoners on the loose are insane and dangerous. In event marketing from the provincial and regional tourism bodies, the tours described "Lower Fort Garry penitentiary" as having "been overrun and the most heinous inmates are on the loose" (Travel Manitoba, 2015;Tourism Winnipeg, 2015). Visitors also "encounter locals and North West Mounted Police officers as they try to keep order and try to end the bloody rampage of escaped convicts" and warned to "Watch your back, because you could be the next victim" (Travel Manitoba, 2015;Tourism Winnipeg, 2015). Framing police as protectors ignores the violence they engaged in historically and perpetrate today (Palmater, 2016), along with the displacement Indigenous people experienced during white settlement (Daschuk, 2013;Taiaike et al., 2005). Local vigilante residents of the fort (i.e., white settlers) are also portrayed as protectors, while spectators are portrayed as brave and deserving of protection.
Reviews of the fort are positive. For one spectator, it was "great for a Halloween visit," they were "pleased with the tour," thought "the history of the fort is amazing," and "can't wait to visit [again]" (Trip Advisor, 2011). Bombarded by benevolent myths of nationhood, the fact that Indigenous voices were missing went unnoticed by visitors who commented on the site. Indigenous leaders such as the late Arthur Solomon have spoken about the way carceral institutions are naturalized and portrayed as necessary.
Kesheyanakwan (Fast Moving Cloud) Solomon was an Ojibwe Elder, residential school survivor and spiritual leader. He helped win the right to allow Indigenous healing methods and traditional ceremonies in prisons. Such representations ignore, in his words, that "We have lived here since long before there was written history. And we had no prisons, we had no police, we had no prison guards. We had no lawyers and no judges, but that does not mean that we had no laws to live by" (Solomon, 1990, p. 2).

Sanitoria
Sanatoria were medical facilities for long-term illness, most typically associated with the treatment of tuberculosis, before the widespread use of antibiotics (Burke, 2018).

Some repurposed sanitorium examples include Idaho State Tuberculosis Hospital
(Gooding, Idaho) and Waverly Hills Sanatorium (Louisville, Kentucky), both are used for ghost tours. Escape rooms are held at Tranquille Sanatorium in Kamloops, British Columbia annually with different themes. Tranquille Sanitorium's "Escape from Padova" (2018) was an escape room/tunnel with a haunted asylum theme. Escape rooms are games where a team of players find clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in locked spaces to accomplish a specific goal (e.g., escape) in a set amount of time. According to the Kamloops Museum and Archives (Gilbert & Fedorak, 2018), the sanatorium was built in 1907 to treat patients with tuberculosis and did so until 1958.
The facility did not treat or employ Indigenous or Asian peoples until after World War II (Norton & Miller, 2002). Prior to this, Indigenous people were sent to segregated hospitals as part of colonial assimilation efforts in Canada (Drees, 2013;Lux, 2010Lux, , 2016. Residential schools and sanatoria were interconnected institutions within the same system of management (Kormarkisky et al., 2015), both reinforcing racial distinctions and inequalities (Lux, 2016). As Kormarnisky and colleagues (2015) find through interviews with Indigenous people who experienced tuberculosis, "What happened 'years ago' profoundly affects the health and well-being of people diagnosed with TB today." Following 1958, the sanatorium facilities were transferred to the Mental Health Services Branch of the provincial government and the site was used as an institution for people, ranging from children to seniors, living with intellectual disabilities. At its peak, Tranquille housed 700 people, a quarter of the provincial population of institutionalized people living with intellectual disabilities (Purvey, 2018). Columbia government issued a formal apology to former residents who suffered abuse at now-closed provincial institutions that imprisoned people living with intellectual disabilities (Globe and Mail, 2003). Purvey (2018) states there are no accounts of abuse at Tranquille featuring the voices of those who were confined there, even in the oral history project conducted by Block (2018).

In 2003, following the testimony from survivors of Woodlands institution the British
In 2018, the provincial government extended compensation to survivors of abuse at the Woodlands site (Canadian Press, 2018). Woodlands is another institution that confined people with cognitive disabilities in British Columbia. Upon receiving compensation for the abuse he endured, Woodlands survivor Bill McArthur encourages "other survivors to reach out to the provincial government to receive their redress as well" and added that "This vindication, I hope, will allow them to live the rest of their lives with a sense of self respect and dignity" (Canadian Press, 2018). Luanne Bradshaw, also a Woodlands survivor, said, "I'm very proud of how far I've come in just being a free person, living life as I see fit and making sure that my identity doesn't get forgotten" (Shaw, 2018). Survivor testimony, along with their aspirations for recognition and respect, are missing at Tranquille.
The site owners, Farm Fresh/Tranquille Ltd. Partnership, exploit fear of people living with diseases and mental health issues, while claiming to provide accurate accounts of the site's history. Coverage notes that, "Every year, this historic property looks for ways to be creative in telling the story of Tranquille." Yet this story telling does not incorporate accounts or the participation of those who were confined there. This absence creates a distance between the confined and the spectator (Brown 2017). The delivery of this information begins with "the first tunnel escape room with actors" (Trudeau, 2018) who rely on dramatization, stereotypes, and tropes. Being confined in the space where others were once confined is framed as entertainment through a partnership with Chimera Theatre. The event relies on representations of risk, illness (Abeysinghe & White, 2010), and theatrics for entertainment. Those who are sick or those who are differently abled are threatening because they are Other. The website reads, "You've snuck into Padova, now you have to find a way to get out. Can you make it out alive?" and "You're trapped underground … and you're not the only one." The site co-owner, Annette Mcleod, claims, "We tell true events that have happened through interactive tunnel theatre. You interact and move through the tunnels with the actors into different rooms" (Trudeau, 2018). Co-owner Tim Mcleod also notes, "The whole idea is to freak people out" (Potestio, 2018). The emphasis of the event is to attract millennials (thus the name choice of Padova, which younger people use for the  (Potestio, 2018). This lays bare the connection between penal imaginaries, liberalism, and capitalism (De Giorgi, 2010).
Tranquille Ltd. Partnership, for which McLeod is the development manager, are continuing to look for partners to invest in the property, privileging the attraction of attention and capital accumulation over providing an accurate and comprehensive history of the site (Potestio, 2018). The escape room does attract interest, while the penal imaginaries communicated naturalize rather than trouble confinement, and do not reflect the stories or wishes of the people who were confined there. A student notes the escape room is frightening, with no mention of the people once confined there: Raggy halls, leaking ceiling with missing tiles and graffiti-stained walls grace you once inside the former asylum. The setting was truly creepy, with the damp air, the missing floor tiles and the signs of old equipment still being stuck to the walls giving a truly haunting experience (Hunter, 2018).

Image 2.
pivotal in understanding the disability civil rights movement (Downey & Conroy, 2020), yet this information appears to be missing in the events now staged there and most often absent in related media reporting. In one outlier article, coverage notes that Baldini and sociologist Jim Conroy believe "the site should become a memorial to the past, not a haunted house" (Tarabay, 2010). Conroy was also given a platform to discuss the painful events that took place at the site: I drove up in 1970 in my dad's blue Chevy, and I saw a place with 3,700 people in it that was built for far, far fewer. And I saw things that I will never forget. … Think of a ward of infants and children from the ages of six months to 5 years old. … There are 80 of them in ... metal cages (Tarabay, 2010).

Image 3.
The thousands who visit the site and those profiting from it outnumber these critical voices. Former owner Richard Chakejian claims, "We went well out of our way to make sure that this event doesn't mock or mimic any of the handicapped. And I believe that the public that comes through here know the distinction and the difference between Tripadvisor (2017) reviews note "What sets this apart from other attractions is the location. Taking place on the eerie grounds of Pennhurst definitely helps set the mood." That it was a site of confinement makes it more entertaining for tourists because "When you hear the stories of what went on there, it only adds to the scare" (Tripadvisor, 2020). Rare accounts also note that education takes a back seat to entertainment, including one that noted, "The attractions are good, but it is sad to see that the history of Pennhurst that was displayed in the first room the first year has been no longer for the last couple of years" (Tripadvisor, 2016). When there was a museum exhibit, spectators were moved through it quickly (Beitik, 2014). As reported in 2014, the admission line movie screen displayed scenes from Suffer the Little Children spliced with footage of lobotomies (Beitik, 2014). Real artifacts from Pennhurst, including an electro-shock therapy machine, are used as props. Former staff led a small number of tours, but persons who were confined there are not given a platform.
Despite a few criticisms, spectator accounts mostly focus on the entertainment provided by actors who portray prisoners confined at the site as monstrous (Higgins & Swartz, 2018). In the words of one spectator, the monstrous depictions of the confined is "my favorite part of all the attractions" such as "the girl (nurse) who's face was covered in blood and she was crept up over top of a hospital bed eating a body ... it was super disgusting looking, obviously, but, this girl was made for Halloween, she looked like she was actually eating a corpse, it was just so realistic" (Tripadvisor, 2019 even gave you sugar pills to swallow-we loved it!" (Tripadvisor, 2019); " [I've been] even picked up by one of the characters and thrown into a steel cage and asked, what do I think of his cell?" (Tripadvisor, 2018); "the actors (and there are hundreds of them) actually crawl on the ground and floors and grab your ankles, feet, pull your hair" (Tripadvisor, 2017). Participants often claim it is enjoyable, with one review noting, "Despite some people claiming that it disrespects the past history of the place, it really just comes down to having some good scary fun during the Halloween season" (Tripadvisor, 2017 That's where discrimination is coming." Remarking on the haunted tours, Jean Searle, co-president of Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance and former resident of another institution, notes: "I don't want to relive the hell that I went through. … I want to try to forget" (Walters, 2010cited in Beitiks, 2014. Liz Spikol (2017), a journalist with a bipolar diagnosis who took the haunted tour, wondered, "Is this how people see me? How is that possible? There is a whole Halloween industry built around the idea that 'crazy people' are terrifying". Accounts that challenge the othering of people living with disabilities are missing in the haunted tours replete with scenes where spectators can regale in human suffering and confinement.

Segregated schools
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 US Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Prior to Brown, racial school segregation was absolute in the South and widespread in many school districts in other parts of the country.

Image 5.
Description: "Student actors portray the drug overdose of a friend at a street party." Image by Dermot Tatlow and caption by Allen (2019). On social media, reviews of the "Haunted Trap House" are positive and affirm the antisubstance use message. One visitor notes, "I think it really is great opportunity to teach our middle school children the dangers of hard drugs, before they are exposed to situations themselves" (Haunted Trap House, 2019). The incarcerated people used in the event also served as the target of advice, rather than source of information from their own experience, with one visitor explaining that "My favorite part was telling the actual inmate that was in there for 18 months because of DUI that I am almost 5 years (sober). I told him that he will be strong enough to stay sober if he really wanted to.
That part really pulled at my heart strings" (Haunted Trap House, 2019). There is no Description: "Cambre Jenkins (right) and another actor (left) play a young woman with a drug dealer boyfriend." Image by Dermot Tatlow and caption by Allen (2019).
Issue 3 "Can you make it out alive?" Investigating Penal Imaginaries at Forts, Sanitaria, Asylums, and Segregated Schools 24 coverage of racialized people speaking about the school-to-prison pipeline and legacies continuing from segregated schools. While relevant, accounts of the school-to-prison pipeline by Black students, such as one provided Theron (a Maryland student who participated in research about education), are missing from the event: "sometimes we get looked at different by our White or Caucasian teachers, but we also get looked at by police watching you while you on your way to school thinking you have something on you because you Black and you a male. They stereotype us a lil too much but that's something that's never going to change" (Grace & Nelson, 2018).

Discussion and conclusion
The meanings of confinement communicated at these sites rely on stereotypes, tropes and dominant storylines. Events are marketed as educational and entertainment, yet draw little from actual history and real experiences, instead privileging the carnivalesque (Presdee, 2017). These penal imaginaries border on fantasy, reflecting neoliberal ideas pertaining to individualism in both state-run and private enterprises (Moore, 2013). Mason and Sayner (2019) describe several ways that silence manifests in museum spaces. Silence of a museum can reflect a broader societal silence about some issues.
A museum staff member can decide that a conversation or set of ideas does not belong to them or is not their responsibility to address (Ferguson et al., 2019). Silence can be by design. In addition to the stereotypical representations on display at these sites, there are also many silences in these depictions of confinement we examine. Lower Fort Garry portrays RCMP and settlers as saviors, ignoring the ongoing colonial violence targeting Indigenous people including through disproportionate tuberculosis rates and police brutality. Tranquille Sanitorium construes the site as a haunted and frightening location, claiming both to tell true history, while also maintaining as its goal to frighten and attract as much attention as possible for future development.
Pennhurst Asylum removed the historical information displays from one of the buildings, and hires "patients" and "medical staff" to act as zombies and monsters. The their symbolic punishment and brutalization in staged cultural scenes is meant to be entertaining. The ethics of creating such images and fostering a social distance between the prisoner and the penal spectator (Brown, 2017) does not appear to be of concern for organizers, who should care about the legacies of their activities.
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, these findings that reveal how incarcerated people are used as scapegoats upon which social unease and anxieties are projected are all the more significant. While the events we examine in this paper occurred before the pandemic, such fright night events continue feeding into anxieties about risk during the pandemic.  (Maynard, 2017;Chartrand, 2019), bearing the brunt of societal stigma and tropes about risk, health, and deservingness. There is a lack of dignity and safety for people in institutions, where it is impossible to be safe, to practice hygiene (e.g., no hand sanitizer provided), and to isolate (Burki, 2020).
Through fright night events, messaging portrays institutionalized people, particularly BIPOC, as underserving of due support and services. Such messaging can create real world impacts, including justifications of who should receive support versus who should be subject to containment in the face of COVID-19. In this context, where the probability of death by imprisonment has only increased (Schwartzapfel et al., 2020), challenging and confronting penal imaginaries has never been more urgent.

Implications
In terms of a contribution to qualitative criminology, we have added to knowledge of penal spectatorship in the United States and Canada. Locating common themes across multiple sites, we have demonstrated how these sites tend to rely on denigrating visual displays of prisoners that invoke racializing tropes concerning disease and so-called criminality. We have drawn attention to the visual politics of these displays by interpreting the curatorial and performative aspects the initiatives. We have also shown how the idea of penal imaginaries can be usefully applied to scenes of penal spectatorship, penal tourism, and penal heritage. In terms of a contribution to and tourists who work at and visit these sites. It is also important to explore if there is regional and national variation in these views, and how these views may inform penal policy in those jurisdictions.
In terms of a contribution to practice, we suggest that the designers and curators of these displays should heed the lessons of critical curatorial studies (Reilly, 2018).
Critical curatorial studies draw attention to the power relations implied in the way museum and heritage displays are assembled and consumed, as well as issues of recognition and representation. It is important to decolonize and deconstruct popular culture and heritage displays using the tools of critical curatorial studies, as well as feminist and critical race curatorial approaches. People who are othered by displays must have space to express how or if their stories should be told at sites. We have noted the silences and absences concerning colonialism in these forums for penal spectatorship. We have likewise examined the racializing tropes concerning disease and "criminality" conveyed. We have drawn attention to the visual politics of these displays by interpreting the representations communicated at these sites. These are forms of display that critical curatorial studies, as well as feminist and critical race curatorial approaches, can address and amend.
We also suggest that anyone assembling museum and heritage displays about incarcerated people and criminalized groups should be more inclusive in their approaches to creating popular culture (Fiander et al., 2016). By not including the voices of imprisoned persons and criminalized groups in the process, these penal spectatorship initiatives and popular penal culture sites are producing more shame, stigma, and exclusion in our world.