‘States of denial’ and haunting in the decommissioned Pentridge Prison Complex

The article brings historical lived experiences of the Pentridge Prison Complex in Coburg, so-called Australia, into conversation with auto-ethnographic observations of the now decommissioned site's redevelopment. Pentridge has experienced a ‘transformation’ of the prison, from its historical role as one of the largest and most infamous maximum-security prisons, into a modern, sanitised residential and commercial prison tourism precinct. This article will present lived experiences that relate explicitly to the lead author's personal connections with and memories of visiting the Pentridge site during the 1980s when her brother was imprisoned there. In this article we highlight the politics of decommissioning institutions, prison tourism and the selective curation of social memory against Cohen's seminal work on the dynamics and effects of official and social denial. We argue that the revisionism and redevelopment of the site represents an extension of the obfuscation, denial and secrecy practised by the authorities in the face of prisoner experiences of violence, harm and death at Pentridge. Contrasting lived experience, personal memories and connections to the prison highlights the incongruence, trivialisation and revisionism implicit in the redevelopment and commodification of Pentridge as a tourism theme park. In conjunction with Cohen's states of denial, we situate our auto-ethnographic approach against aspects of sensory and ghost criminologies. However, our aim is to maintain a focus on dynamics of power and representational politics by contrasting the lived experience of having a family member incarcerated in Pentridge with recent observations of the redeveloped site. We contend in this context that remembering is a necessary form of resistance to come to terms with the consequences of state denial and avoid the replication of future carceral logics and systems.