Prison tourism as a national heritage: foreign experience

In the article the authors raise questions about the continuing impact of liberty deprivation on a person's life and how these former places of detention are interpreted, visited, promoted as destinations and ultimately understood today. Nowadays, wars, battlefields, cemeteries, concentration camps, prisons, dungeons, murder sites, ghost stories and other manmade disasters are packed and presented to people as a tourist attraction. The attraction of death and disaster is a powerful motivator for tourists. Prison tourism as a subgroup of dark tourism is itself an important heritage area. The article discusses the features of prison tourism as one of the subspecies of dark tourism. Prisons are places where many different, dissimilar people serve their sentences, and different events are concentrated: escape attempts, death, violence, and suffering are the part of these stories. With this type of tourism, former detention facilities have become a popular tourist experience as decontaminated prisons are turned into museums or hotel facilities. The article differentiates former foreign prisons recognized as objects of the greatest educational, economic and entertainment value. However, by linking incarceration exclusively to the past, commenting on the prison experience, and presenting historical prison tourism as a form of entertainment, historical prison museums reduce the objective realities and human costs of incarceration.