Creating Over Consuming: Repurposing Prisons for the Humanities (and for the Humans)

• In Event: Consuming Carcerality as Entertainment: Critical Perspectives and Opportunities to Practice Hope and Resistance

Abstract

From 2000 to 2022, 21 states either partially or fully closed at least one correctional facility. These closures reflect longstanding efforts to lower imprisonment rates and the increasing public awareness that mass incarceration has not been a beneficial public safety strategy. As a result, there is an emerging interest in repurposing these former correctional facilities to benefit communities. Prison reuse planning is an innovative approach that facilitates the creation of civic spaces serving as healing alternatives to incarceration. Repurposing closed prison facilities also helps address the disparity in incarceration rates and the pervasive racial bias present in the criminal justice system. While examples in the United States are more limited and often still retain aspects of the space’s carceral past, other nations have repurposed these former prisons into performing arts, educational, and community-building spaces. We discuss how reuse projects, previously promoting carceral logic and/or carceral harm, are now spaces for creation, aligning with anti-carceral and abolitionist values.

Authors

• Alison Colby, East Carolina University

• Ashley Kilmer, Towson University

• Lucas Alan Dietsche, Adams State University