Criminal Pleasures: Exploring Crime, Genocide and Terrorism as Tourist Experiences

Laura Huey, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Concordia University, has conducted extensive research in the fields of policing, surveillance and social exclusion (her current book on these subjects, Negotiating Demands: The Policing of Skid Rows in Edinburgh, San Francisco and Vancouver, will be published next year by the University of Toronto Press). More recently, her research interests have taken her in the direction of cultural criminology and the social meanings of 'crime artifacts'. She is presently engaged in fieldwork on this subject.

Historically, crime and punishment functioned as public acts that afforded the uninvolved bystander the opportunity to participate in the pleasures of'crime as spectacle. Today, punishment is largely a private matter, and most violent crime is consumed through mass-mediated formats rather than experienced directly. It could reasonably be argued that the latter is a function of the former - that is, we consume vast quantities of mediated crime because the hidden nature of crime-related pain and suffering has recast crime as a perverse fetish requiring outlets that the capitalist market continually seeks to exploit. In this paper I explore the commodification of crime, terrorism and genocide as forms of consumable tourist experience. Through an analysis of tourist destinations (including the Rothenberg Kriminalmuseum, the Dachau Memorial and the Kingston Penitentiary Museum) as well as ‘thematic experiences' (Belfast's Terrorism Tours and Ottawa's Crime and Punishment Tour) what is revealed are new modes of consumption and expression of our pleasure in the spectacle of ‘criminal pleasures'.