Hannah Thurston

Don’t Mess with Texas: Stories of Punishment from Lone Star Museums

Stories about crime continue to captivate and titillate audiences all over the world. From fictional accounts of notorious gangsters to the biographies of real-life serial killers, suicide bombers and sex offenders, criminals, and their crimes both terrify and fascinate us in equal measure (Jewkes 2011). Similarly, the punishment of offenders is big business in the culture industry. Prison movies have always been a sub-genre of the crime film, but in more recent years, we have also seen the proliferation of prison and death row documentaries, each promising to show us the hidden realities of life behind bars (see Cecil and Leitner 2009; Surette 2011). It is thus now widely accepted that punishment not only exists within the prison cell or execution chamber, but it also thrives in books, websites, stage plays, and Hollywood blockbusters, in its (re)presentations (Brown 2009; Smith 2008).

Museum ethnography: researching punishment museums as environments of narrativity

Like all museums, punishment museums and sites of penal tourism are inherently political and moral institutions, offering cultural memories of a collective past. As environments of narrativity, these are significant spaces in which the public ‘learn’ about the past and how it continues to inform the present. In line with recent studies about ‘dark’ tourist sites, this article argues that the crime/punishment museum and jail cell tour can – and should – be understood as an ethnographic opportunity for narrative analysis. Rather than focus on just the findings of such an analysis, this article seeks to provide a practical guide to data collection and analysis in the context of criminological museum research. Offering illustrative examples from a study of Texan sites of penal tourism, it demonstrates how the history of punishment – as represented in museums – is an important part of cultural identity more broadly, playing a significant role in how we conceptualise (in)justice, morality and the purpose of punishment. In short, this article discusses how we can evoke the ethnographic tradition within museum spaces in order to interrogate how crime and punishment are expressed through narratives, images, objects and symbols.

Re-imagining Texas as a Place of Harsh Punishment

With more than 550,000 people under some form of criminal justice supervision, and having performed its 517th execution in 2014, the Lone Star State has a reputation for harsh judicial punishment. Yet criminologists rarely take a state-specific approach to the study of punishment in America. Instead there is a pervasive tendency to reduce the complexities of individual US states—and their relationships with punishment—into a simplistic binary of Northern and Southern. The nuanced position that punishment (and stories told about punishment) achieve within the cultural production of state-specific meaning is lost in totalising arguments about an ill-defined Southern punitiveness.

A Narrative Journey Through Inmate Identities

This is the final chapter in a trio of chapters which have sought to shed some light on different aspects of the Texan punishment story. In the previous two chapters we discovered boastful stories about the size of the Texan Correctional Institutions Department; sad stories about those who have lost their lives fighting in the war on crime; nostalgic stories about Old Sparky and riding the thunderbolt; impressive stories of modernisation and painful stories of grief and loss. However, what we have yet to look at in any great detail are the inmates themselves, and the institution in which they reside. This final chapter of Part III will thus consider the stories the museums and tour guides tell about the character of prisoners and the nature of prison.

Epilogue: So Where Do We Go from Here?

This book has offered many conclusions, but wherever there are answers there will always be more questions. Looking to the future it is my belief that we—as cultural criminologists of punishment—still have much to achieve. For example, I was unable to explore the silences within the memories Texas uses to speak about its history. Looking back over those stories, whether it’s the Alamo defenders, the cowboy, or the pioneer, the Texan character is generally depicted using an Anglo-identity; these are white, male memories. Future work could (and in my opinion should) examine how depiction of race and gender are used within the constructed image of Texanicity. Questions about who is forgotten, why they are forgotten, how they are forgotten and what this cultural forgetting tells us about Texanicity and its relationship with punishment remain unanswered. Clemons (2008) agrees that Texas continues to be branded with reference to this image of an Anglo-man. Criminologists could explore the ways in which each new (re)presentation of Texanicity (be it J. R. Ewing from Dallas, Hank Hill from King of the Hill, or Sergeant Walker from Walker, Texas Ranger) reinforce the character of Texanicity with reference to whiteness and maleness but also toughness, boldness and a willingness to engage in combat.

‘Texanicity’ and Its Punishment Dimensions

The stories being told about Texan punishment, by the media, by scholars, by politicians and indeed by me, often construct Texas as a place of harsh punishment. However, the Lone Star State is more than just the ‘execution capital of the world’. Proud of its history and of its culture; Texas is a place with its own compelling state history. Speaking about the ways in which the small towns and cities of Texas market themselves to tourists, Avraham and Daugherty (2012, p. 1385) suggest that ‘among US states, arguably the strongest narrative is that of Texas—cowboys, cattle, desert vistas and the Lone Star flag are all widely known, and heavily used, symbols of the Texas story’. Drawing on the work of Avraham and First (2003), which considered how ‘Americanicity’ presented itself in Israeli advertisements, Avraham and Daugherty (2012) go on to speak about the images that define what they term ‘Texasnicity’.

The Cultural Life of Punishment in the Southern States

The cultural turn within the sociology of punishment has meant that whilst issues such as race (Young 1991), due process (Fitzpatrick 1999), American constitutional requirements (Bright 2000) and the practicalities of taking life (Denver et al. 2008) still feature, recent work has also dealt with the (re)presentation of capital punishment and the prison in film and literature (Boudreau 2006), the construction of victimhood narratives within the trial (Sarat 2002), the discourse of finding closure, usually by witnessing an execution (Bandes 2002) and the exploration of American culture with a focus on concepts such as dignity (Whitman 2003), vigilantism (Zimring 2003) and honour (Cohen and Nisbett 2004). It is this shift toward a more culturally sensitive outlook that has signalled a renewed interest in the specific culture of American punishment (Garland 2005; Steiker 2002, 2005).

Telling Tales About a ‘Tough Texas’

Texas is often heralded as the most punitive state in America, yet how much do we really know about the Lone Star State and its relationship with punishment? Lots of people are telling stories about Texan punishment, but what do those stories teach us? And how is the Texan punishment identity constructed both within academic scholarship and within mediated messages? This chapter seeks to answer such questions. We will begin by exploring the sociology of punishment scholarship for Texas-specific discussion and argument, and then move on to consider some statistics relating to Lone Star punishment. Once we have established this scholarly and statistical image of Lone Star justice we will examine some recent cases which have been used to highlight Texan punitiveness in the national (and international) news media, and discuss the extent to which Texan political discourse tells similar tales of a tough Texas.

The Significance of Stories in Museum Research

Stories are an important way in which we make sense of ourselves and those around us. They can be personal tales of conquest or defeat, political narratives of power or resistance, sensational reports of morality or depravity. Some stories encourage a subtle change in routine while others incite people to march the streets demanding change. Some become legends cemented in time, others are destined to be forgotten even by those who tell them. Whether they make us laugh or cry, angry or relaxed, stories are everywhere—from Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species to the many infamous guests on The Jeremy Kyle Show; from the pedagogical parables of the Bible to my ‘Nanny Enid’ and her tales of my father’s childhood escapades. Whether we tell our stories to a global, local or familial audience matters not. Indeed we may even tell our stories in complete solitude. Irrespective of who is listening we live in a storied world.

Becoming a Texas Tourist

In the summer of 2013, I left England to spend six months as a Texas tourist. The research trip, funded by the Christine and Ian Bolt Scholarship Fund (University of Kent), involved travelling around the Lone Star State to visit both punishment museums and tourist sites associated with history. In this chapter I will share with you some of my experiences in order to contextualise both the research sites and the stories told within them. More specifically though, this chapter will introduce you to the Texan punishment museums, the tourist sites associated with history, to Texas more generally as a place, and to some of the Texans I met while on my travels. The structure of the chapter follows the order in which I visited each of the locations. We will therefore begin our journey as I did, in Eastland.