The Lessons of Empty Prisons, European Style

Yesterday the Dublin sun emerged midday and for the rest of the day, not a drop of rain fell.

I walked over to Kilmainham Gaol, a late 18th century prison in which most of the great names of Irish rebellion were held and many executed. After independence, the Irish Free State closed it (1924), and it is now a museum in which your tour guide explains that the horrid cells were considered a penal reform when the prison was built.

Here's a photo of the main cell block soon after the prison was closed, the broom used for the final sweep-up sitting in the foreground.

The notice on the right side of the photo is a copy of the order to close the prison:

While it is not as though Ireland has closed all the prisons, it was remarkable to walk through a prison preserved as a monument to what's wrong with prisons. And to listen to the tour guide's spiel -- an employee of the state repeating a state-approved script, the politics of which I suspect you'd find very little if anything to quibble with. I had the thought listening to him that we could borrow the script and with a few adjustments, use it for tours of our closed prisons when that time comes.

A few years ago Ruthie and I toured a similar prison/museum in Peniche, Portugal -- an old coastal castle converted to a prison where Salazar housed political prisoners from 1930-74. In both prison museums, a lot of the exhibition space is devoted to the political prisoners who are portrayed as heroes in the struggle that produced the current regimes (the Irish Free State and post-revolutionary democratic Portugal). But both also make a strong association between the prison itself and the unfreedom of the British occupation & Salazar's fascist Estado Novo. The prison as an institution is portrayed as an instrument of oppresive rule -- by states that of course still operate prisons.

the prison/museum at Peniche

I wonder whether we in the US need some sort of dramatic political break before we'll be able to use our empty prisons to educate future generations about how bad things used to be. Regime change?

~ Craig Gilmore, California Prison Moratorium Project, CURB Member