Sharing Lived Experience With Incarceration to Inspire Visitor Empathy

• In Event: 54.064 - Engaging Complex Social and Scientific Issues in Informal Learning Spaces

Abstract

Eastern State Penitentiary once stood as the first true penitentiary in the world – built to inspire true regret into the people punished inside it. Today it stands as an abandoned prison and historic site visited annually by over 200,000 people from all around the world. The historic site works to raise public awareness about mass incarceration and the legacy of Eastern State to visitors who are mostly on vacation - 70% of whom identify themselves as never having broken the law, been arrested, or known someone who is/has been incarcerated (for more information on mass incarceration, see Travis, Western, & Redburn, 2014).
In an effort to humanize the issues surrounding mass incarceration, and create empathy in historic site visitors, Eastern State Penitentiary launched a pilot tour program that hired formerly incarcerated people to give tours of the building. These fifteen-minute tours allowed visitors to hear personal stories of incarceration alongside the history of a space at the prison. Preparation for the project began a year before it launched – weighing ethical, legal and marketing considerations. Would this job re-traumatize the tour guides? How would visitors react?
All guided experiences at Eastern State Penitentiary are based in dialogue-facilitation techniques (ICSC, 2015) and utilize open-ended questioning to encourage visitors to reflect and discuss what they think (Costa & Kallick, 2007). This approach fulfills the historic site’s mission of creating a public forum to discuss issues of justice. Pilot program tours followed this same structure, and tour narratives were constructed utilizing lived experience to push visitors to consider the role and significance of food, art, and religion in prison, as well as questioning the constitutionality of solitary confinement.
Four pilot program tour guides provided over 350 tours to approximately 2,000 visitors over eleven weeks. 74 visitors were surveyed following their tour to see if the program was meeting the goals of creating empathy, humanizing mass incarceration, and moving visitors towards action around these issues. Results showed that 42% of visitors immediately reported more positive impressions of formerly incarcerated people. 74% of visitors planned to change their actions or thoughts about incarceration – including hiring a formerly incarcerated person, thinking more positively about formerly incarcerated people, or advocating more for criminal justice issues in their communities. Almost half of visitors responded that their favorite part of the tour was hearing about the guide’s lived experience with incarceration, and 97% of visitors would highly recommend the tour they participated in.
These results support the use of personal storytelling to connect visitors to complex issues, especially one hidden from out society. After taking a tour with someone who spoke about their lived experience with incarceration, visitors could see themselves making change, thinking differently about a stereotyped and disenfranchised population, and moved emotionally – many visitors cried on pilot program tours (Jamison, 2014). Eastern State Penitentiary believes this project was a success, that our visitors gained new perspectives, and that our organization will never be the same, especially when it comes to who tells the stories of Eastern State Penitentiary and how we tell them.

Author

• Lauren Zalut, Eastern State Penitentiary