‘A prison is no place for a party’: Neoliberalism, charitable fundraising, carceral enjoyments and abolitionist killjoys

ABSTRACT

This paper explores a case study of the struggle over the cultural meanings of charity and imprisonment related to United Way’s 2019 Rockin’ The Big House fundraising concert in partnership with Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) and the City of Kingston at Kingston Penitentiary. Contributing to literature at the intersection of penality, prison tourism, and the charitable sector, we examine how staging authenticity and fostering penal spectatorship were central to driving ticket sales for and encouraging enjoyment at the concert held on the grounds of Canada’s first penitentiary. Based on an analysis of internal government records and CSC communications with United Way, we demonstrate how event planning and advertising relied on denigrating stereotypes regarding criminalized persons. Highlighting the value of collective organizing, action research, and newsmaking interventions aimed at opposing carceral enjoyments, we illustrate how cultural meanings of penality can be confronted as a means to advance abolitionist politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Charity
• imprisonment
• prison tourism
• penal spectatorship
• carceral enjoyments
• abolitionism

Introduction

‘On September 14, 2019, 2,500 lucky music lovers, history buffs and curiosity seekers will walk through the gates of Kingston Penitentiary to experience an outdoor music festival like no other in support of United Way’ (UW KFLA, 2019a).

Neoliberal restructuring since the 1970s has resulted in state divestment from the provision of social welfare, with the charitable sector increasingly playing a role in the provision of government services (Eikenberry & Mirabella, 2018). In turn, the charitable sector has dedicated material and symbolic capital for raising additional funds to expand their operations and meet the growing demand for their services. Charity also operates as a way of bringing human behaviour in line with dominant expectations of law-abiding and productive citizenship (Valverde, 2008). As the role of charities has grown in domains responsible for the management of human beings pushed to the margins by systems including ‘criminal justice’, these entities have become reliant on government service provision contracts in ways that punish those who resist, or who cannot participate in, the wage economy (Wacquant, 2009).

United Way has become a principal vehicle for charitable activities across North America, including through the annual campaigns of its local chapters, raising funds that are redistributed to select charitable organizations that provide services to people pushed to the margins who they refer to as ‘clients’ (UW, 2021a). The funds raised also cover the administrative costs of United Way chapters themselves (UW, 2021b). Among the fundraising approaches favored by United Way chapters are charitable events that tap into the popular demand to consume punishment, but at a safe distance from prisoners and their lived realities, a phenomenon that Brown (2009, p. 8) refers to as ‘penal spectatorship’. Such events include ‘jail and bails’ that place community figures behind bars who can be freed through charitable donations (Antonacci, 2017); tours of decommissioned prisons that portray human caging as necessary, while ignoring its many harms (Atkinson, 2019/2020); and ‘Seeing is Believing’ tours of United Way funded homeless shelters (UW KFLA, 2019b). These are examples of charitable fundraising that rely on ‘carceral enjoyments’, which Dilts (2021) defines as ‘material, psychic, and symbolic benefits and privileges … “purchased” through the racialized social deaths of others, effected in our contemporary moment by the practice of incarceration’ (p. 197).

Although research has begun to document different forms of penal spectatorship (Brown, 2009; Dirks et al., 2015; Pedersen, 2017) in prison tourism sites globally (Wilson et al., 2017) that reproduce ideologies supportive of imprisonment (Walby & Piché, 2015), little scholarship has explored how cultural meanings of penality can be confronted and destabilized in the service of abolitionist politics. In this paper, we explore a case study of the struggle over the cultural meanings of charity and imprisonment leading up to, during, and following the United Way’s 2019 Rockin’ The Big House fundraising concert in partnership with the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) and the City of Kingston at Kingston Penitentiary (KP) in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. We examine how staging authenticity (MacCannell, 1973) and fostering penal spectatorship (Brown, 2009) were central to driving ticket sales, encouraging an enjoyable concert atmosphere, and positive memories associated with the event held on the grounds of Canada’s first penitentiary that played an integral role in white settler colonialism following the country’s confederation in 1867 (Oliver, 1998). Based on an analysis of internal government records and CSC communications with United Way, we show how event planning and advertising relied on stereotypes regarding criminalized persons. We also explore how concert organizers attempted to whitewash the fact that countless people, many of them Indigenous and Black (Atkinson, 2017), suffered and lost their lives at KP during its operation as a penitentiary from 1835 to 2013 by insisting that charitable ends justified its fundraising means.

Recognizing that building decarceral futures requires more than documenting how ‘social life [is] produced by the social death of confinement’, we describe our efforts as ‘supporting killjoys, becoming killjoys ourselves, and ceding the floor to those best situated and able to disrupt the flow of the ‘good feelings’ of carcerality, including the good feeling of ‘reform” (Dilts, 2021, p. 198, original emphasis; also see Ahmed, 2010; Al-Saleh & Noterman, 2021), which United Way sought to tap into to generate material and symbolic capital to expand its operations integral to maintaining inequality in neoliberal times.¹ Inspired by Ahmed’s (2010) account of the feminist killjoy who disrupts forms of pleasure and happiness derived from heteropatriarchy and the diminishing or endangering of the well-being of marginalized others, an abolitionist killjoy is one who disrupts both the pleasure of seeing others punished by the punitive injustice system and the pleasure of participating in ‘feel-good’ reforms that extend the reach of the neoliberal-carceral state. The aim of an abolitionist killjoy is not merely to make people feel bad about their emotional investments in carceral logics but to clear space for more liberatory feelings of joy in solidarity with others. Our concept of the neoliberal-carceral state is informed by Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2007), namely the economic transition and political realignment from a Fordist/Keynesian model to the contemporary post-Fordist/neoliberal model over the last decades. Under neoliberalism, societal discourse produces ‘deviants’ who are deemed to require harsh punishments and/or management through social welfare agencies and charitable organizations, legitimating narratives of crisis and the expansion of both carceral industries (e.g. prisons, policing) and coercive forms of ‘care’ in the non-profit sector (Wacquant, 2009).

Below we detail our work as abolitionist killjoys and the ways we attempted to disrupt the neoliberal charitable activities of United Way that prey on, legitimate, and benefit from the carceral in Kingston. We also explore how our public interventions, which included writing op-eds, interviews in broadcast and print media, as well as organizing a public forum and campaign, shifted discourse around the KP concert in ways that highlighted how the event not only failed to connect people to the realities of incarceration and marginality, but also reproduced stigmas integral to the material exclusion of imprisoned people under the guise of ‘doing good work’ for communities. We highlight the value that newsmaking approaches (Henry, 1994) can play in collective organizing and action research aimed at dissipating carceral enjoyments derived from taking part in charitable activities (Maguire et al., 2019) and prison voyeurism (Ross, 2015).

To contextualize how United Way benefited from the symbolic cachet of imprisonment, we review literature on charitable organizations and penal spectatorship. We argue that through fundraisers like the KP concert, United Way taps into desires to observe imprisonment as a means of generating funds for programs to mitigate the impacts of social exclusion, rather than their structural causes. In interrogating and resisting what Maguire and colleagues (2019) call a ‘penal drift’ in charitable organizations – which entails the adoption of ‘criminal justice’ culture and language – we illustrate the need to challenge narrow ideas of ‘deservingness’ and ‘redemption’, which re-inscribe neoliberal values and solutions through reference to individual responsibility. As Morvaridi (2012, p. 1191) notes, ‘neoliberal capitalist philanthropy is both politically and ideologically committed to market-based social investment through partnerships, to make the market work or work better for capital’. These means do not justify charitable ends, and we conclude by proposing alternative ways of organizing outside a carceral-charity model.

The role of penal spectatorship in charitable fundraising

To conceptualize the role of charitable fundraising and penal spectatorship in the context of neoliberal restructuring, which prompted our abolitionist killjoy interventions regarding the Rockin’ The Big House concert at KP, we assess (a) the context of carceral industry in Kingston, (b) literature on the role and activities of non-profit entities, and (c) scholarship on the symbolic role prison tourism events that tap into the desire to safely enter carceral spaces for the purposes of entertainment plays in the material reproduction of imprisonment. Following this, our literature review situates (d) our abolitionist stance and how it shapes our organizing in the face of charitable endeavors that seek to foster enjoyment out of the violence of imprisonment to raise funds that help lay the groundwork for further state divestment from and the punitive realignment of social welfare.

Kingston – Canada’s prison capital

Kingston, Ontario, has long fostered its status as the penitentiary capital of Canada. There are numerous carceral sites in Kingston, including the oldest penitentiary in Canada (Kingston Penitentiary, commonly known as KP), Rockwood Asylum for the ‘Criminally Insane’, the Fort Henry military installation, and newer federal penitentiaries for men. Kingston is also home to the first federal Prison for Women (P4W), which is now the site of a negotiation between a private company (Siderius Developments Inc.) redeveloping the building and lands versus the P4W Memorial Collective – a group of formerly imprisoned women – who wish to develop commemorative spaces within the site (Mussell, 2019a; Howes & P4W Memorial Collective, 2021; Naphtali et al., 2021). Kingston has also hosted a spectrum of other detaining institutions including forensic mental health at Providence Care, the Kingston House of Industry (workhouse for ‘paupers’), House of Providence Orphanage (for ‘home children’ from England), and until recently, the St. Lawrence Observation and Detention Home for criminalized youth.

During the 19th century, visitors such as Charles Dickens were invited to tour KP to admire its structures and methods of confinement (Miron, 2011). The contours of this voyeurism have shifted over time with the carceral industry in Kingston continuing to serve as a site of growth and reputation, bolstered through voyeuristic activities by stakeholders such as CSC, the City of Kingston, and United Way. The key subject of voyeuristic undertakings is KP, which closed in 2013 and has since hosted regular prison tours (Shook et al., 2020), a growing number of film shoots, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police equestrian event, and a rock concert. These activities raise millions of dollars for the city’s tourism and charitable industries. They are marketed as beneficial for the community and stakeholders. CSC, Canada’s federal prison agency and owner of KP, embraces opportunities to generate good will and maintain the value of the property pending its eventual sale. United Way seeks to increase fundraising totals each year and sees little problem in commodifying the prison to do so. The City of Kingston also seeks to expand local tourist, film, and charitable industries, with KP playing a pivotal role in this pursuit.

The commodification of KP shifted in 2020, when the City of Kingston and CSC struck a new agreement increasing the yearly lease amount from a $1 token sum to $1.1 million (Mussell et al., 2020a). This agreement secures use of the prison for up to eight years. United Way had benefited as the charitable partner and recipient of half of tour profits until the 2020 season when the proceeds were divided between the City of Kingston and St. Lawrence Parks Commission (Mussell et al., 2020b). The implications of these institutional relationships and opposition to their prison-themed messaging for charitable purposes that are the focus of our analysis have received little scholarly attention.

Charitable means and ends

Charities work to develop trust and legitimacy with the public (Julian et al., 1997), which gives them the benefit of the doubt as to the worthiness of their activities, including during times of crisis and scandal. These entities need to appear to be practicing good governance to attract donations (Balser & McClusky, 2005). Charitable agencies also engage in impression management on matters such as the diversity of their employees, since these factors can influence public perceptions and donation rates (M. Stone et al., 2001).

Charities are also producers of cultural products (Harbaugh, 1998), notably through their advertisements and press releases, which often legitimate the devolution of state social welfare functions to their sector. Guo and Saxton (2018) argue that charities, also known as non-profits, spend as much time on communications as they do on donations. This is reflected in fundraising and administrative cost ratios for United Way of Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington. Fundraising and administration accounts for 19% of each dollar they raise, including 5.45% management and administration costs, along with 13.53% fundraising costs (Canada Revenue Agency, 2018).

Problems have emerged in the realm of charity governance, including bribery and embezzlement (Eaton & Akers, 2007). MacDonald and colleagues (2002, p. 69) argue that charities and philanthropy may engender conflicts of interests and cronyism. Copeman and Banerjee (2021) contend that philanthropy creates the expectation of future gifts and reciprocation. Ethical breaches such as organizing events centered around voyeuristic encounters with human suffering are part of this list of non-profit malfeasance seen in various sectors, from international aid (Walby & Monaghan, 2011; Lohne, 2020) to punitive injustice (Atkinson, 2019/2020). While philanthropic giving can be motivated by social responsibility, other impulses include building social capital and generating legitimacy (Bornstein, 2009). The idea that philanthropy contributes to community development is indeed part of a political discourse indebted to neoliberal governance (Nickel, 2018).

J. Wilson (2014) critiques philanthropic communications that accompany entrepreneurial strategies of accumulation, which tout individualizing and risk-based discourses. Philanthropy supports capitalist and state relations by diverting attention from alternative ways of addressing poverty and conflict. It is not only aligned with capitalism, in that it obscures the need for wealth redistribution and the abandonment of global economic development premised on neoliberal restructuring (Jensen, 2019), but it reinforces the idea that progress should be defined in economic terms. While philanthropy can be an effective fundraising vehicle, this does not necessarily mean charities have a moral compass (Jensen, 2019, p. 187). Kuldova (2018) argues that corporations generate incredible amounts of capital based on the consumption of harmful goods and services, alongside public philanthropic giving that is minimal by comparison. There is hypocrisy in philanthropy, since many corporate donors engage in production practices that are socially and environmentally damaging (La Cour & Kromann, 2011).

Charitable pursuits, carceral enjoyments and the abolitionist stance

Not only do the charitable (Farrell, 2015) and prison sectors (Gilmore, 2007) play a significant role in structuring communities, they also call forth emotions that deepen a community’s psychic and material investment in carceral systems. Even in the shadow of prison closures where debates emerge about what to do with defunct sites of confinement, it is difficult for communities reliant on imprisonment to imagine decarceral futures for the buildings left behind, let alone people pushed to the margins made to rely on charity and subject to punitive intervention. As scholars and organizers who (a) privilege solidarity and mutual aid over charity (Dobchuk-Land, 2017), (b) seek alternatives to criminalization and punishment as a way of responding to social conflicts and harms (Law, 2011), and (c) align ourselves with comrades leading struggles to build decolonial futures beyond racial capitalism (Calathes, 2017; Saleh-Hanna, 2017), we see defunct carceral institutions as key sites of material and symbolic struggle. As abolitionist killjoys, we seek to disrupt and transform the good feelings produced when charitable organizations team up with carceral institutions to repackage sites of confinement and punishment into fun zones of entertainment ‘for a good cause’.

The goal is not simply to make people feel bad about sites of intense violence and suffering, but rather to build a world characterized by a just distribution of resources and power to ensure the well-being of all people (Calathes, 2017; Saleh-Hanna, 2017), as well as life-affirming, humane, and just responses to conflict and harm (Dobchuk-Land, 2017). To achieve this goal, it is crucial to adopt an ‘abolitionist stance’ (Mathiesen, 2008, p. 58) that rejects attempts to whitewash destructive atrocities of the past and accumulate wealth through forms of penal spectatorship (Brown, 2009). Such spectatorship generates carceral enjoyments (Dilts, 2021) through the peddling of dehumanizing stereotypes. However, as Fiander and colleagues (2016) have argued, scholars must go further than examination, critique, and rejection of such endeavors by entering terrains of penal spectatorship and opening up space for critical punishment memorialization that centers the voices of criminalized people to illuminate the harms and structural violence of human caging. When inspired by the principles of action research where analysis of the terrains upon which one wages social justice struggles informs collective action that then informs ongoing analysis and engagement (Morgan & Ramirez, 1984), such work can be harnessed by abolitionist killjoys to expose those deriving pleasure from penal spectatorship to the unethical dimensions of their activities, which can take the enjoyment out of symbolic engagements with the carceral.

Penal spectatorship, prison tourism and the commodification of punishment

Brown (2009) advances the concept of penal spectatorship to refer to ways people come to understand imprisonment and punishment. Television programs, movies, and video games are among the cultural forms relying on stereotypes of law-breaking, which shape understandings of penality. Penal spectatorship has material effects by shaping how people and institutions attribute meaning to punishment (Brown, 2009). Such images can humanize the people represented or denigrate them using stereotypes (Brown, 2014).

Decommissioned sites of confinement that have been retasked as prison tourism destinations are vectors of penal spectatorship (Welch, 2013), as they often rely on stereotypical depictions of people held behind bars in ways that support their ongoing social exclusion (J. Z. Wilson, 2007). Prison tourism is one among many types of dark tourism sites that generate profits through the commodification of human suffering and death (see R. Stone et al., 2018). Images at such sites can create a distance between the viewer and the harm being represented (Brown, 2009), which can have a trivializing effect. Prison tourism destinations also tend to individualize issues of harm, rather than point to systemic and structural issues that give rise to them (Chen et al., 2016).

Simon (2010) and Loader (2009) contend that the appetite for punishment leads to punitive cultural phenomena whereby criminalized persons are symbolically dehumanized. Shame and humiliation are central in ‘criminal justice’ practices and popular culture, from ‘crime’-themed television shows (Kohm, 2009), to reality programming shot in prisons (Lynch, 2004), to spectacles such as mug shots (Linnemann & Wall, 2013) that reproduce stereotypes about criminalized persons. Carrabine (2012) argues that there is a visual politics and ethics to such representations, and that the creators of such images have a responsibility to consider the harm that such visual culture can engender. Carney (2015) argues that such denigrating images undertake a virtual marking on the body of the criminalized, rebranding, shaming, and sorting them from other people. Forms of penal spectatorship are also racialized and deny the history of colonialism (Kennedy, 2017; Morris & Arford, 2019) as a driver of criminalization, which we highlight in our analysis of the Rockin’ The Big House concert at KP. Through our analysis of struggles over cultural meanings of charity and penality associated with the KP concert, we examine the penal spectatorship facilitated by United Way. We also trace the local networks involved in reinforcing these symbolic practices that translate into material benefits in Kingston, which relies on human caging to economically sustain its community and residents (also see Mussell et al., 2021).

Note on Method

As part of a larger study that examines the intersection of penal spectatorship and charitable fundraising in Canada, we collected nearly 200 open-source documents describing the Rockin’ The Big House concert from websites, social media platforms, and news articles. We also obtained 469 pages of unpublished records from CSC about their involvement in this United Way event through an Access to Information (ATI) request.² Coding was both inductive and deductive. Deductive themes include the contours of institutional partnership, fundraising, and portrayal of prisoners and charitable donors, although we remained open to other themes emerging. We used thematic analysis initially to locate patterns in the sample to organize and assess the data (Braun & Clarke, 2012). We then used discourse analysis in the second stage, focusing on written or spoken language, to examine what information representatives from the three partner organizations shared (Dunn & Neumann, 2016). We focused on who was involved (and excluded) in discussions about the United Way concert, what language and values were promoted and provided authority/legitimacy in these statements, who was valorized or demonized, and how such language and values were presented as beneficial. We also examined visual content, focusing on the manifest and latent content of imagery and depictions of charity and penality (Valverde, 2006; Wilson & Landon-Hays, 2016).

Beyond unpacking representations of charity and penality advanced by United Way and CSC created for the Rockin’ The Big House concert, we explore how our organizing informed by abolitionist action research (Mathiesen, 1974) confronted how carceral logics were being reproduced as part of the concert and charitable fundraising at KP to destabilize them and advance alternative representations. This analysis highlights how abolitionist killjoys can challenge charity and penality in neoliberal times where governments and communities are increasingly reliant on both to manage those pushed to the margins by structures of inequality. While we did not explicitly use the term ‘abolitionist killjoy’ while organizing before the concert at KP, we have identified our work as such in retrospect to acknowledge the role that feelings play in grassroots organizing to destabilize penal spectatorship and advance alternative representations of human caging. We reflect on the possibilities and limits of ‘killing joy’ as an abolitionist strategy in the final section of the paper.

Struggles over cultural meanings of charity and penality

The Rockin’ The Big House concert was held on 14 September 2019 and promotional articles, social media, and webpages focused on bringing together popular Canadian artists, many of whom have ties to Kingston, in a ‘historic’ venue. When United Way announced the event in May 2019 it promoted ‘This Historic Concert’ as follows: ‘[it] will bring some of the finest Canadian talent together in support of United Way of KFL&A, the first-ever public concert to be held on the grounds of the oldest penitentiary in Canada, Kingston Penitentiary (1835–2013)’ (UW KFLA, 2019a). The musicians and the venue were represented as a historic coupling, and there was no contemplation of the implications of holding an event on the grounds of a decommissioned prison.

The concert at KP reflected the neoliberal-carceral context as an example of penal spectatorship that exploits the fraught history of the institution for economic interests. Concert spectatorship at KP expanded the commercial appeal of a shuttered carceral site, allowing new or evolving ways to build capital with the rationale that such activities are ultimately for the good of society through charitable donations (United Way) and economic growth (Kingston’s local economy). Concert spectators were invited to enter into a once forbidden place with the promise of light-hearted fun for a good cause, reinforcing the division between those who are sent to prison for bad or unruly behavior and those with the freedom to come and go as they please (even if they, too, indulge in unruly behavior when moved by the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll). Overall, the concert was one episode in a more expansive carceral-charity network that cleanses spaces like KP for further capitalist development and exploitation.

Promotional articles focused on what United Way considered positive: donated musician time, local vendors, fundraising for their charity, the partnership with CSC, and the reuse of a historic site. The concert was promoted as an altruistic event, shifting away attention to the commodification of punishment. For Joanne Langlois, concert organizer and spouse of participating Tragically Hip member Paul Langlois,

This coming together of musicians who are both, from Kingston, or attached to Kingston in some way, playing for our United Way is heartwarming … It is important that our community recognizes that all of these bands are donating their time and their talent. (UW KFLA, 2019a)

Scott Harris, then Regional Deputy Commissioner of CSC and 2019 United Way Campaign Chair, stated: ‘Thanks to the amazing partnerships that have been formed over the years, we are able to organize this one-of-a-kind event in Kingston’ (UW KFLA, 2019a). There is no critical understanding of what it means for a charity that fund services for residents pushed to the margins to partner with a prison agency, nor for concert entertainment to be held in a decommissioned penitentiary where people suffered and many died. There are already penal myths built into the architecture of the penitentiary (Fiddler, 2011), including the high perimeter walls and austere aesthetics, which makes KP a wholly unsettling backdrop for commodified and trivializing displays of suffering.

From the ATI files we obtained, the partners discussed how far to go with the branding of the event in relation to the promotional poster (see Figure 1). In correspondence, CSC Regional Administrator of Communications and Executive Services Wayne Buller wrote to CSC Associate Assistant Commissioner Amy Jarrette: ‘The only issue a [sic] can see would be the representation of the officer with the baton. This would not be something an officer would be carrying however I know it is also a caricature of a prison guard’. CSC Associate Assistant Commissioner, Communications and Engagement David Showell wrote to Buller:

We want to be a little bit careful with this. On the one hand we all agree the baton should be out, but at the same time we don’t want to be seen in any way as having approved or endorsed the contents of the poster. I think it would be best if we could ask them to remove the baton (I also don’t like the American style orange prison suits, but that’s just me) but make clear that we are not approving the poster or its content. If there are complaints, we will be directing them to the organizers.

Figure 1. ‘Rockin’ The Big House’ Event Poster (UW KFLA, 2019a).

Here, CSC officials are generally fine with the poster that local organizers designed despite its stigmatizing portrayal of prisoners. Their only concern is to sanitize prison violence by removing the baton, which may have raised the ire of prison staff who were a main target for concert ticket sales. Yet their deflection of criticism did not extend to a firm rejection of inaccurate US-inspired orange and stripped jumpsuits that may raise concerns by prisoners, their loved ones, and advocates.

As backstage discussions around the concert took place among organizers, members of the Carceral Cultures Research Initiative – which had been studying the commodification of punishment for charitable purposes at KP since the April 2012 announcement of its closure – contacted members of the Kingston-based P4W Memorial Collective in June 2019 to see if there was an interest in organizing together to challenge charitable fundraising through penal spectatorship.

Given that the City of Kingston has a population of under 125,000 people and is a relatively tight-knit community, we decided to approach some of the principal concert organizers to gauge whether there was room to involve criminalized people and de-center sensationalized prison imagery from the event. When efforts were made to contact United Way and other organizers about their promotional materials, they rebuffed the idea that they were sensationalizing imprisonment to attract attention. They also refused to acknowledge that the cultural meanings imbued by the representation of musicians as prisoners and guards on their event poster were problematic. There was no acknowledgement of the cultural meanings attached to the event logo, which features hands bending apart cell bars. Merchandise registered with concert organizers that was later sold despite our criticism included clothing items with prison numbers and stigmatizing cultural references (UW KFLA, 2019c; see Figure 2). From ATI data we learned that on 2 July 2019 CSC Ontario Region Communications Manager Kyle Lawlor wrote to United Way KFLA Chief Executive Officer Bhavana Varma expressing concern about: ‘the cultural attachments to Straight Out Of Compton [‘Straight Outta Kingston Pen’] and the black community and issues that we have with the over-representation of black men in the correctional system’ (see Figure 3). Varma replied claiming that she was unaware of the meaning of the phrase, which she and her committee approved and sought to sell, but ultimately abandoned following the concern raised by CSC. Although Lisa Guenther, an expert on carceral politics that was part of organizing efforts, reached out to Varma on 19 August 2019 offering to donate their time to improve the awareness of organizers around the history and framing of imprisonment, the ATI data notes that ‘The United Way has declined her support’.

Figure 2. ‘Rockin’ The Big House Official Webstore’ (UW KFLA, 2019c).

Figure 3. ‘Straight Outta Kingston Pen’ Mock-up (UW KFLA, 2019c).

In event promotions, the prison was described as infamous, ‘known for housing some of Canada’s most notorious criminals’ (UW KFLA, 2019a). News coverage echoing United Way’s press releases often began with this point. An article in the Kingston Whig-Standard noted, ‘The prison that once held some of Canada’s most notorious criminals will be hosting some of the country’s best-known musicians for a fundraiser this fall’ (Hendra, 2019). Public curiosity about the prison was exploited to promote the concert where ‘2,500 lucky music lovers, history buffs and curiosity seekers will walk through the gates of Kingston Penitentiary to experience an outdoor music festival like no other in support of United Way’ (UW KFLA, 2019a).

For organizers, generating money that would be used in a stated effort to mitigate the challenges faced by people pushed to the margins in Kingston and entertaining those privileged enough to purchase a concert ticket were sufficient justifications for holding the event without involvement from criminalized people once held at KP and other federal penitentiaries, including Ricky Atkinson who offered to speak and play music during the fundraiser (as expanded in a section below). Instead, local and regional business interests were advanced through commodifying both confinement and charity, including the music industry that launched several participating band albums alongside the KP event (Gerard, 2019). This commercializing of the carceral is insensitive to the pains of imprisonment. For example, the prisoner number on some concert paraphernalia is marketed as a fashion statement, but is a source of pain and shame for imprisoned people (Minogue, 2009).

‘A prison is no place for a party’

With our backstage interventions having gone unheeded, we started brainstorming a counter-event entitled ‘Teachin’ Against the Big House: Teach-in on Prison Entertainment & Redevelopment’ to (a) foreground the voices of formerly imprisoned people once confined in one of Kingston’s many prisons, (b) account for the community’s deep ties and role in white settler colonialism and genocide through the deprivation of liberty, and (c) problematize penal spectatorship as a capital accumulation strategy for the charitable and tourism sectors. We also engaged in media interventions before the concert. As part of our action research, these newsmaking activities sought to advance ‘replacement discourses … directed at the dual process of deconstructing prevailing structures of meaning’ we were analysing and ‘displacing these by new conceptions, distinctions, words and phrases, which convey alternate meaning’ (Henry, 1994, p. 289) associated with the KP concert. In so doing, we sought to diminish the carceral enjoyments those involved in organizing, performing, and attending the event could derive from mocking the ‘big house’.

The first media intervention was an op-ed entitled ‘A prison is no place for a party’ (Mussell, 2019b), which was published by a prominent outlet in the weeks leading up to both the concert and our counter-event. To destabilize the presumed good that would come from the charitable concert at KP, the piece asked, ‘What does it mean to hold a party in a place with a long history of death and suffering?’ and ‘Is a prison the right venue for a public rock concert?’ The op-ed went on to challenge the entanglement between ‘using prisons for entertainment and philanthropy’ both within and beyond Kingston. The piece also addressed the ethical issues associated with transforming decommissioned sites of confinement like KP and P4W into sites of dark tourism, rather than places of ‘healing, memory and awareness’ that account for prior carceral uses, along with troubling histories and contemporary realities of injustice – including colonialism, racism and patriarchal violence – that human caging perpetuates and perpetrates. In light of the continued erasure of the voices of current and formerly imprisoned people at such sites, the op-ed closed by asking, ‘Where do we go from here?’

Where there had previously been little reflection on the symbolic and material implications of the KP concert, this newsmaking intervention ignited a debate that forced event organizers to defend their sensationalistic, voyeuristic approach to charitable fundraising. Now on the frontstage, United Way remarked in media coverage that ‘There were some terrible things that have happened there [i.e. KP] and that is something that we acknowledge and will acknowledge at the event as well’, while also pivoting to underscore,

This is an event that is going to raise funds, just as the money from the [KP] tours that the United Way receives, has been invested in programs for youth, we will invest this money to help youth stay out of homelessness (Mazur, 2019).

In other forums, including the provincial-wide CBC Radio program Ontario Today (Chen, 2019), Varma remarked that while she recognizes the delicate nature of organizing a charitable concert at a decommissioned penitentiary and that ‘it is important to have a dialogue’, the event was raising funds for youth homelessness initiatives ‘so that we can prevent some of the issues that lead to youth ending up in the criminal justice system’. The silence regarding our ethical questioning about use of prison imagery and penal spectatorship persisted.

From the ATI data, a debrief report noted the criticisms, and that the event would have been more controversial if proceeds were going to a private company and not United Way:

Two weeks before the event, there was some criticism of the use of this space for a concert as well as the tours. The group felt that former inmates needed to have been included. … There was an organized open forum discussion at Queen‘s University two days before the event to discuss the use of Kingston Pen making reference to “dark tourism”. There have been counter articles in support of the use of space, since the prison has been decommissioned and the funds used for positive good. I suspect it would be very controversial if the proceeds were for a private company.

As the above reveals, the organizers made the calculation that the event’s association with United Way and the claim that the concert was raising money for ‘a good cause’ was essential for the event to proceed, and to ensure its financial and networking potential.

‘Teaching against the big house’

With the Rockin’ The Big House concert approaching, we began to publicize our teach-in counter-event at Queen‘s University and our pamphlet, ‘10 Things You May Not Know About the Big House’ (P4W Memorial Collective, 2019/2020). The counter-event poster, which situated the controversy around the concert within debates on the use of prisons in Kingston related to KP (Shook et al., 2020) and P4W (Mussell, 2019a), along with the handout generated media interest, including from the Kingston Whig-Standard, the city’s most read newspaper.

In an 11 September 2019 story, event co-organizer Lisa Guenther explained our primary motivation as abolitionist killjoys for putting on the event: ‘The reason why we created this teach-in is to actually bring some of the voices of formerly incarcerated people into the conversation because they’re just not there in the prison tours that are going on’. Turning the attention back to the KP concert, she added: ‘Is it appropriate to have a rock concert with all of the musicians on the poster dressed up as prisoners or guards?’ She closed by noting that the exclusion of the voices of criminalized people concerning the ongoing and future uses of KP and P4W cannot continue, insisting that ‘We need a multifaceted discussion about how best to remember the past as well as not getting stuck in the past but trying to address some of the problems and issues that are raised by incarceration’ (MacAlpine, 2019a).

Having set the stage, the counter-event on 12 September 2021 attracted an audience that filled a large atrium at Queen‘s University. The teach-in began with a land acknowledgement by Lisa Guenther that delved into the role that KP, P4W and other prisons – both in Kingston and across the country – played in the colonization of Indigenous lands and peoples. The floor was turned over to Ricky Atkinson, who described his stints as a prisoner at KP, along with the cruel realities of imprisonment and the role music played in prison life. He expressed his disappointment that United Way and their partners failed to involve the many musicians that the penitentiary once imprisoned in their concert, noting that he offered to be involved as a speaker and musician but was turned down. Ricky concluded by sharing his view that the site should ‘attract tourists not to the supposed greatness the Pen brought to the City of Kingston in low-paying jobs and wasted taxpayer dollars to run it, but to the stain on society KP and the carceral still brings’ (Atkinson, 2019/2020).

From there, former federal prisoners Donny and James Hogan spoke of their experiences in local CSC institutions, including being subject to experiments in the name of rehabilitation. Much of their commentary, which was picked-up in a Kingston Whig-Standard story published the following month, focused on the exclusion of prisoners’ voices from KP tours. Donny noted that ,

All the people that went on tours so far have been lied to … The people are making money off the suffering and the death of a lot of them that died in the prison here … There’s hundreds of thousands of people who have walked through there who haven’t heard the truth, and the truth will set them free.

James noted that any rights prisoners have gained over the years were not the product of state benevolence, but collective struggle: ‘Anything the inmates ever got, they got through violence, they got it through riots, death and blood … that’s the only time changes were ever made, unfortunately … That’s why we’re still not in the ball-and-chain era, breaking rocks’ (MacAlpine, 2019b).

After the Hogan brothers spoke, Ann Hansen, a former P4W prisoner and member of the P4W Memorial Collective, shared her insights on how the histories of KP and P4W were materially connected and continue to be so through the symbolic violence taking place in the redevelopment of both sites without the involvement of criminalized people once confined there. With respect to the former, she noted that KP once imprisoned women prior to the construction of P4W and even after when authorities deemed it necessary in the name of institutional order and security. She highlighted many linkages, including the deployment of the all-male KP Emergency Response Team to quell resistance at P4W, including during the April 1994 incident where criminalized women at the prison were stripped naked and shackled (Arbour, 1996). With respect to ongoing symbolic violence, Ann noted that the redevelopment plans for KP and P4W both involved the erasure of historical and contemporary realities of life before, during and after imprisonment, points which were echoed in a handout later produced to counter KP tour narratives by the P4W Memorial Collective (2020) with Linda Mussell.

Justin Piché and Kevin Walby then discussed the ethical and moral issues associated with the concert, situating it within ‘the broader context of racial colonial capitalism’ that turns a profit off the continued colonization of Indigenous peoples. They centered their comments on the words of former Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie, a Canadian icon, who urged people to ‘#DoSomething’ to ensure the barbarism of Canada’s genocidal past would not continue into the future. They then asked, ‘What would Gordie do?’ From there, they unpacked problems with current KP-centric fundraising activities and alternative ways the United Way and its partners could ‘put music and performance together to promote justice that don’t involve ‘mockin’ the big house’, including organizing charitable concerts for prisoners in active sites of confinement, donating equipment and their time to enable prisoners to pick up music themselves, and to denounce the criminalization of those who have used art to challenge the existing order. They noted different ways that the realities of imprisonment can be better communicated in KP tours, including through privileging the voices of current and former prisoners. To this end, they read a statement by A Former Indigenous Prisoner Who Was Apprehended and Taken Away From Their Family by the ‘Child Welfare’ System (2020[2019]), who was once imprisoned at the Regional Treatment Centre located on KP’s grounds following an attempted death by suicide, to highlight the connections between colonialism and confinement that have sustained imprisonment throughout the penitentiary’s existence. They concluded that ‘if organizations profiting from the human misery of the past and making a living off of it in the present don’t take this modest step’ and include criminalized people in charitable fundraising efforts, ‘perhaps another thing to consider where KP is concerned is to stop tapping into the demand for sensationalism, and to tear down those walls as some former prisoners have argued’ (Piché & Walby, 2019).

‘Local love’ that is ‘tragic, but not hip’

As abolitionist killjoys we were able to advance narratives that contested the hegemonic meanings charitable concert organizers had used to promote the KP event. While concert organizers vowed their event was an act of ‘local love’ to raise funds to help people pushed to the margins, we insisted that they were ‘mocking the big house’ by organizing a party on the grounds where people have suffered and died, while tapping into tropes about imprisonment that contribute to the exclusion of criminalized people. We insisted that charitable ends do not justify the symbolically violent means used by United Way and its partners, including CSC. Where concert organizers tapped into nationalism and ‘local love’ by underscoring the involvement of celebrated Canadian and local acts in the concert, we noted the role KP and other prisons have played in entrenching white settler colonialism. When they excluded the voices of formerly imprisoned people in the planning of the concert, we ensured their voices were present in public debates about what it means to host a party on the grounds of a decommissioned prison without any involvement of criminalized people in the name of social inclusion.

The show did go on, however, with United Way insisting they welcomed the dialogue, but taking the position that there are many perspectives about the concert and those advanced as part of our interventions were just one set among others of equal value. With no meaningful movement on the part of the concert organizers to address the concerns raised about their event, and bands, volunteers and concert goers set to regale in carceral enjoyments, we decided to contest the event and any future fundraising efforts at KP.

With Paul Langlois and other members of the iconic Canadian band The Tragically Hip involved in the concert – without their lead singer Gord Downie, who had set up The Gordie Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund ‘to shine a light on Indigenous reconciliation and the history of residential schools in Canada’ before dying from cancer in 2017 – we made sure that all who had a role in the charitable event were aware of how their party was at odds with Downie’s end of life commitment. We did so through sharing presentation notes from our teach-in event through a blog post published the day before the concert entitled ‘Tragic, but not hip: Escaping prison tourism at KP’ (Piché & Walby, 2019) that was sent by email to the management of the Downie & Wenjack Fund, all bands set to play at the concert, event sponsors, food and beverage vendors, as well as all members of the United Way annual campaign with the following text:

Please read the post linked below about the concert at Kingston Pen tomorrow and KP tours, and what could be done differently when planning for the United Way KFLA’s 2020 charitable campaign gets underway.

To cast doubt over the event among those involved, we also launched a petition (Change.org, 2019). With the petition having already accumulated dozens of signatures, we sent another email to those involved in the concert informing them of the petition and noting the following:

The demands in the petition are that (a) tours and other fundraising initiatives (e.g., “Rockin’ The Big House” concert) at Kingston Penitentiary be transformed due to their unbalanced representation of imprisonment and punishment in Canada that exclude the voices of prisoners, and (b) that a representative group of current Kingston area prisoners and former KP prisoners should be invited to take a lead role in shaping tours and other uses of KP, including its use as part of the local United Way’s fundraising efforts. If current stakeholders are unwilling to meaningfully engage with the voices and standpoints of criminalized persons, we demand (c) that they should stop the use of KP altogether.

If KP tour partners and beneficiaries agree to demands A and B in short order, the petition organizers are willing to assist in facilitating the meaningful involvement of current and former prisoners. If not, we will have no choice but to plan a public awareness campaign once today’s party is over that we will launch at a later date to drive petition signatures and other actions.

If you have not read it already, please have a look at the post linked below about the concert at Kingston Pen today and KP tours, and what could be done differently when planning for the United Way KFLA’s 2020 charitable campaign gets underway […]

In terms of the concert today, hopefully an acknowledgement of the dark history of imprisonment and colonialism that reverberates in the present will take place and stick with people amidst the good music, company, food and drink.

The email rankled some of its recipients. One local vender pulled out from the concert, privately emailing us that they agreed the use of the prison is problematic. Conversely, a concert organizer who was part of the United Way annual fundraising drive took the time to write and send the following message to the dozens of people on the email thread:

I have read your unsolicited social justice treatise.

As someone who has worked both in the prisons and in the justice system, my initial impression is that you are talking out of your ass. I could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I can tell you that your attempt to introduce nonsense verbs into the debate is off-putting. One is not criminalized. One behaves in a fashion that we as a society have designated as worthy of punishment or that threatens the safety of others. In consequence of that behaviour, individuals are called to bear personal responsibility. They enter the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system is not perfect, but an individual’s participation in it does not constitute victimhood such that they become entitled to a voice in who may or may not engage in use of its infrastructure.

Your constituents benefit disproportionately from the good will and services generated by the United Way. Put away your moral indignation and do something to help former incarcerated persons. Organize an event at the prison. Do something meaningful to help your community. Keyboard advocacy is slothful and irksome.

I don’t need any more of your emails. Please remove me from your list.

This note was followed by an email from CSC’s Scott Harris, offering a meeting ‘to discuss further how we might better ensure that the voices of stakeholders, including former inmates at KP, can be represented in any interim uses of the facility, pending the eventual sale of the property by the federal government’.

These interventions provoked uneven responses. For instance, some band members responded by entering the stage in prison garb. For his part, concert emcee Paul Langlois acknowledged the controversy around the concert, while insisting that ‘Gordie would be here with us tonight’, all the while ignoring the hyperimprisonment of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the fact that residential schools that Downie sought to raise awareness about through the fund he established have contributed to intergenerational trauma and confinement in Canada (Monchalin, 2016; Chartrand, 2019). Our interventions as abolitionist killjoys were on the minds of many of those involved in organizing Rockin’ The Big House whose carceral enjoyments were, at the very least, tempered in the face of criticism and alternative visions of charitable fundraising.

Reflections on the cultural work of abolitionist killjoys

During our organizing around the concert at KP we defined success as follows: (1) stopping the concert; (2) changing the format of the concert to include formerly imprisoned people as speakers and performers; (3) sending a collective message that future events along these lines would also be contested via counter-events and media interventions; (4) raising public awareness of the history of KP and calling forth a greater sensitivity to the institution as a site of colonialism, state violence and suffering; and (5) complicating the positive feelings produced by this event. Our level of success along these measures varied.

The concert went on and did not include former prisoners as speakers or performers. Yet we did send a collective message that future events along these lines would be contested, and we were successful in raising public awareness of the history and appropriate uses of KP. We unsettled some of the good feelings generated around the event – leading, for example, to anxious email exchanges between representatives of CSC and UW, as well as the withdrawal of at least one local vender from the event.

At the same time, however, our abolitionist killjoy tactics arguably helped to intensify feelings of pride and solidarity among some concert organizers and performers. The unpredictable power of public emotions makes the intervention of abolitionist killjoys both necessary (insofar as carceral forms of enjoyment will continue to underwrite neoliberal punishment unless interrupted and contested at every turn) and ambivalent (given that emotional and economic investments in a project may be deepened rather than disrupted when publicly challenged by others).

The risk of intensifying carceral emotions suggests that for the tactic of ‘killing joy’ to be effective for abolitionist organizing it ought to be complemented by the creation and amplification of alternative, anti-carceral forms of joy, such as the pleasures of community-building and collective action that are generated by abolitionist organizing. In the words of Angela Y. Davis, ‘Our work against violence must be done with joy and song and art to prefigure a world we want’ (Adkins, 2015). While killjoy activism is indispensable in calling critical attention to emotional and economic investments in the carceral state, it might not be enough to prefigure the world we seek to build or reclaim as abolitionists. These considerations are especially important in the context of charitable campaigns that invite the public to feel good about carceral enjoyments. As the imagery and messaging by organizers of the Rockin’ The Big House concert at KP illustrates, United Way engages in fundraising strategies that rely on stereotypes of criminalized people, which are among the marginalized populations they claim to serve. Such practices of penal spectatorship – from the promotional poster featuring band members in prison jumpsuits and guard attire used to boost ticket sales to the prisoner number emblazoned gear sold to commemorate the concert – are not neutral communications. Such depictions are designed for the pleasure of the penal spectator and the latent effect is to legitimate imprisonment (Mason, 2006). By advancing such representations, United Way denigrates marginalized persons and makes light of their suffering for financial gain. These kinds of virtual punitive markings (Carney, 2015, p. 245) prop up the purveyors of these images, in this case United Way and their partners seeking to raise funds for charity. There is no way that a goal like fundraising for community development can justify such ethically dubious means. The penal drift (Maguire et al., 2019) of ‘criminal justice’ culture and framing into the visual politics of United Way fundraising erodes the ethics of their work.

To contest such representations as abolitionist killjoys (Dilts, 2021) requires collective organizing to challenge the alignment of United Way and other charities with capitalism and neoliberalism – not only in Kingston but indeed across Canada and elsewhere across the world – and to confront the ideas that justify imprisonment in their punishment-themed events. Further abolitionist interventions that privilege the voices of the criminalized and challenge the material and symbolic violence of human caging are needed to continually underscore that the means (penal spectatorship) do not justify the ends (generating money for charitable causes) until such time that the ‘carceral-charity symbiosis’ (Kleuskens et al., 2016) is dismantled.

If the goal is to alleviate suffering, charitable organizations like United Way ought to cease using stigmatizing representations in their fundraising, while reorienting their work toward grassroots, community-based endeavors. Today, the prison ‘is promoted as a remedy for criminal insecurity and urban marginality, but it only serves to concentrate and intensify both, even as it makes them temporarily invisible’ (Wacquant, 2012, p. 1). The approaches to fundraising analyzed here, which rely on penal spectatorship, naturalize the prison and criminalization. There are many ways that the United Way could raise funds to alleviate marginalization without reproducing stigmatizing representations. These include working with grassroots groups and learning from them about the ethics and politics of organizing in non-hierarchical, empowering ways. Working with criminalized groups in a participatory way and refusing to capitalize on the iconography of old penitentiaries is necessary to ensure the ends justify the means in fundraising and community development. Anything short of this only sustains the converging corporatization (O’Malley & Hutchinson, 2007) between charities, donors, and funders, and carceral entities.

Ongoing anti-carceral organizing at the grassroots level is needed as development and commercialization of KP continues. We foresee possibilities of continuing to disrupt or trouble carceral pleasures, while generating and amplifying abolitionist joys, by collaborating with criminalized and formerly incarcerated community members in creative, life-giving ways to present alternative understandings of penal institutions like KP through multiple mediums (e.g. op-eds, radio interviews, teach-ins, meetings with officials). Strategic moments for these efforts to both kill (carceral) joy and redirect the desire to feel joy towards abolitionist solidarity will likely include events such as the renewal or renegotiation of lease agreements, opportunities for public consultation provided by the City of Kingston, evolving uses of the site (e.g. increasing film industry usage), announcements about the sale or redevelopment of KP, and redevelopment at adjacent repurposed carceral sites such as Rockwood Asylum (Mazur, 2021).

There are, however, limits in doing this future work, including potential backlash from members of the public as well as public, private, and non-profit institutions. For this reason, we need to remain attentive to both the carceral pleasures we seek to interrupt and the abolitionist feelings of connection, solidarity, and joyful collaboration that we seek to amplify. Given the emotional labor involved in such work, sustainability is an important concern. The capacity for abolitionist killjoys to carry on this work takes energy, time, and resources in the context of many anti-carceral projects requiring attention. This need for sustainability further underlines the importance of cultivating abolitionist feelings of hope and desire for a meaningful sense of connection and social justice beyond neoliberal investments in punishment and/or charity. Abolitionist work faces many challenges given the speed and ferocity with which carceral logics repackage themselves as charity, entertainment, or education, but this is precisely why we need to build and sustain abolitionist alternatives.

While the concert at KP was primarily justified through charitable donations, the current use of the prison as a setting for film and television shows proceed purely with the rationale of economic stimulation, job maintenance and creation, and civic pride through seeing KP reflected in entertainment media. What other forms of representation might call forth pride and public investment in moving beyond punitive models of accountability towards transformative practices that aim to make prisons obsolete (Davis, 2003)?

If ‘abolition democracy’, whereby resources and power are equally distributed (Davis & Mendieta, 2005), remains an abolitionist aspiration, cultural struggle at the intersection of the prison and non-profit industrial complexes (INCITE!, 2007) cannot be an afterthought. As the presence of both in places like Kingston makes evident, decarceral futures cannot be realized without dismantling sources of carceral enjoyment and affirming the abolitionist joy of transformative community-building, both at KP and beyond.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number 435-2017-0100). The authors thank the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Social Sciences for awarding a Collabzium Grant that covered the open access publishing fee for this article.

Notes on contributors

Linda Mussell

Linda Mussell is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Political Studies and Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

Justin Piché

Justin Piché is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Director of the Carceral Studies Research Collective at the University of Ottawa (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada).

Kevin Walby

Kevin Walby is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Director of the Centre for Access to Information and Justice at the University of Winnipeg (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada).

Lisa Guenther

Lisa Guenther is a Full Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada).

Notes

1. For more context on our abolitionist stances and organizing, please see Mussell and Guenther (2021); Piché (2016); Walby (2011); Guenther (2018).

2. To view the records obtained from CSC in response to Access to Information request A-2019-00310 pertaining to the Rockin’ The Big House concert visit the Carceral Cultures Research Initiative’s website at: https://www.carceralculturescarcerales.ca/critical-punishment-memorialization-patrimonialisation-pnale-critique