Hard Tourism: From Prison to Museum

Five years ago, Ronnine Bartley — an educator for “at-risk” children in New York — frequently made the trip to visit her husband, who was incarcerated behind the foreboding walls of Sing Sing Correctional Facility. She had no time for talk of memorializing the place and was skeptical that such a concept would only “sensationalize the lives of those already exploited.” Today, as her husband Lawrence has become an Emmy-nominated journalist for Inside News, Bartley sits on the board of directors of a planned Sing Sing Prison Museum — so unique that she muses “it probably shouldn’t be called a museum at all.”

U.S. exhibit spaces connected to prisons include Louisiana’s Angola, the largest maximum-security facility in the country, known for chain gangs and now featuring a hall of horrors to honor past suffering. Abandoned in 1971, Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, can be booked for “Halloween tours.” An estimated 1.5 million annual visitors gawk at “the Rock” of Alcatraz, that “inescapable” prison-turned-highlight of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. But the mission at Sing Sing — which still holds 1,300 men 30 miles from New York — is becoming “a focus for the national conversation about criminal justice reform,” as executive director Brent Glass trumpets.

The museum is currently projected to open in 2025, the 200th anniversary of when 100 incarcerated men built the jail that would house them. The name derives from the Native American Sintsink people and their term for “stone on stone” (now the name of the Museum’s app). The surviving original cell block, nearly as long as three full-sized swimming pools, will be the central outdoor exhibit, described by Glass as “a rare American ruin, a cathedral-like sacred space.” But as Glass tries to lure prospective museumgoers “up the river,” he hopes this phrase that is so associated with harsh punishment will take on a new meaning.

For seven years, Glass — an historian and director emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History — has led a juggling act between eager tourism officials and cautious prison administrators. His task is to balance a collection of historical artifacts about lurid gangsters with the country’s contemporary concerns over having the world’s largest, and most racially iniquitous, prison population. Glass promises an institution that will be “not just about you — the incarcerated — but by you, filled with your voices and participation.”

According to Bartley, “the museum will avoid exploitation of those impacted, by telling stories through their eyes.” Two people who were previously incarcerated at Sing Sing are currently on staff, while others will be museum guides. Organizations like the Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison and The Marshall Project will offer talks and workshops. “Our job is changing the narrative about this systemic atrocity,” Bartley says. With New York State’s prison population having halved in 13 years, she says her team doesn’t “just want to talk about problems, but solutions.”

Already established on the museum website are “Justice Talks” webinars that deal with wrongful conviction, solitary confinement, arts rehabilitation, and Black and women’s history. “The Museum has to be a place for truth telling — including crime victims and prison guards, too,” Bartley says. Yet Sam North, a teacher at nearby Ossining High School for 22 years, told OZY, “In understanding our system through Sing Sing, we have to be sensitive to voyeurism.” Recruited as a board member and webinar coordinator, North worries, “When visitors go to the cell block, they may glimpse incarcerated individuals. We don’t want them to be seen as monkeys in a cage.”

With the museum’s encouragement, North created a course on prison reform for 80 high schoolers. Students made suggestions for exhibits, such as placing markers of Sing Sing marble for every execution victim. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, some students were able to spend a day with incarcerated people as part of the course curriculum. The prison, meanwhile, offers rehabilitation programming for prisoners and educational opportunities, including an M.A. in religion from the New York Theological Seminary.

The museum will also display some sensational historic relics, such as clippings about the famed bank robber Willie Sutton; the serial killer known as “Son of Sam;” a murderer-turned-gardener, the “Rose Man of Sing Sing;” and the deeply controversial execution of accused spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The museum will also effectively popularize movies like the 1932 film “20,000 Years in Sing Sing,” which led Warner Brothers to make an associated donation to the prison gymnasium. The museum also acquired a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth at the New York Yankees’ 1929 exhibition game, held on Sing Sing grounds; museumgoers will be able to walk the prison diamond.

The museum can connect present-day debates about criminal punishment with Sing Sing’s lesser-known role as a laboratory for reform. While at its inception the prison enforced silence among prisoners while performing hard labor, subsequent administrators eliminated forced labor, solitary confinement and “lockstep” discipline. Warden Thomas Mott Osborne, who served only from 1914 to 1916, won fame — and derision — for advances in self-governance, rehabilitation and entertainment under the rubric of the Mutual Welfare League. His great-grandson now sits on the Museum Board.

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Glass continues to face obstacles. While the idea of a Sing Sing museum was first broached in the 1970s and has been studied seriously since 2005, he has still had to reassure local governments and prison authorities about legal liabilities. Laborious grant applications have yielded just over half the $10 million estimated for construction. The pandemic has slowed and set back efforts. And just recently, Glass has had to abandon plans to convert the Sing Sing Powerhouse and adjoining repair shop — an enormous two-story space that would have been a perfect museum entry point within walking distance from commuter trains — because it was proving too costly.

Sing Sing sits out of sight for city residents and, when approached by train, looks like some dark wound descending from a steep slope to the glittering river. “With those views,” said Ossining Mayor Rika Levin, “developers would love to turn it into condos.” When it opens, the museum may become as iconic as Sing Sing itself, so long as it can keep its promise of inclusivity. “We’re really in the transformation business, transforming the prison’s relationship to the community, transforming the idea of museums themselves,” said Glass. And what about the broader system of criminal punishment? Perhaps this ambitious project will speed the day when prisons themselves are largely museum pieces.

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