This project explores the contemporary history of segregation in Scottish prisons, focusing on measures of ‘special handling’ particularly the network of small units that was operative between the 1950s and the 1990s. Scotland has a complicated, troubling, idiosyncratic and, to a lesser degree, inspiring tradition of special handling measures, involving generic punishment blocks, anachronistic isolation units, highly innovative specialist units, ‘safe’ and ‘silent’ cells, and more collective segregation spaces such as vulnerable prisoners wings. Such sites have provoked considerable attention across public and political arenas; they have been sources of shame, pride, criticism and confusion; in specific penal moments, they have been experienced by prisoners (and officers) as warzones, sanctuaries, coffins and creative spaces; and, in terms of efficacy, they have both exacerbated and ameliorated the behavioural difficulties of the prisoners contained within them. The objectives of this research are (1) to chronologically map the evolution of key segregation sites, attending to the external pressures that have informed the policies, procedures and rules governing their protean use, (2) to explore the impact of particular environmental factors on the initial design, operation and, subsequently, the closure of these sites, and (3) to reflect on the relationship between space and the ways individuals have understood, coped with, and in various ways ‘acted-out’ their segregated confinement. Deciding who, how and why to segregate prisoners raises questions of a conceptual, operational, political, and moral nature. But deciding where to segregate prisoners situates such questions within the physical constraints and potentialities of space. By adopting a spatial-temporal approach, this research straddles disciplines, utilising the methods of penal history, prison sociology, and – though in a more approximate manner – the steadily burgeoning sub-discipline of carceral geography. Additionally, by marshalling a number of personal testimonies, this history attempts to capture the emotional resonances of segregation – how it feels to actually live and work in ‘prisons within prisons’.

This thesis examines a widespread yet understudied tourism destination in Canada – the police museum. I visited and collected data at three police museums in the province of Ontario, Canada: the Toronto Police Museum and Discovery Centre in Toronto, the OPP Museum in Orillia, and the RCMP Musical Ride Centre in Ottawa. Engaging with Brown’s (2009) theory of “penal spectatorship”, I investigate how these sites (re)produce and circulate meanings about penality through their different representational practices. I identify three dominant themes and argue that the police museums foster social distance between visitors and those in conflict with the law. By sharing these findings, and along the way reconceptualizing the definition of police museum, identifying fifty-nine police museums in Canada, and presenting a Canadian police museum typology, this thesis lays some groundwork for expanding the horizons of penal spectatorship theory and penal tourism scholarship to the realm of policing.