Prison Tourism

In my nearly half-century on this earth, I’ve experienced quite a bit. Having spent more than just a night or two homeless, I was taken aback some years ago by a news clip which profiled a San Francisco company that, for a not-at-all nominal fee, would allow you to experience homelessness for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Let that sink in for a moment – People. Paying. To be. Homeless.

Now, my years as an addict and general loser at the game of life have shown me much – I’ve been turned away from a homeless shelter for not having something with an address on it; I’ve been put on hold after, in a moment of legitimate crisis, I dialed up a suicide hotline. So I was comfortable in saying that I’d thought I’d seen it all. Yesterday, while reading a several-weeks old edition of a national newspaper, I found out I was wrong. The homeless-tourism gig wasn’t the last of it: it turns out you can pay to go to prison. 

Now, I’ve been incarcerated for the past fifteen years, save for a few short-lived tastes of freedom, so I’m the first to admit that I’m not hip to all the latest trends. I’d heard of “adventure tourism” and I know that it’s just human nature to want occasionally to walk at least a few feet in someone else’s shoes. That being said, I was still left shaking my head at the idea that if you’d like to check a prison stay off your bucket list without complicating your life by acquiring a criminal record, there’s good news!

Al Capone’s cell at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Photograph by davidevison / Adobe Stock.

Want to pace the floor of the same six-by-nine-foot cell where Al Capone whiled away some of his younger years? Want to lay your head on the same type of drab and not-at-all-comfortable steel bunk that I and most other jailbirds drift off to dream on every night? Airbnb has got you covered. From Iowa to New Zealand, decommissioned prisons are making their cells available to paying customers. Speaking from experience, however, it takes more than a concrete box and some iron bars to make a prison. To make the experience truly authentic, you’d need the yelling of the guards, the ever-present threat of spontaneous violence and, of course, the random strip and cavity searches. Then, perhaps, you could tell people that you truly did time. But this prison-cell-as-crash-pad option certainly gives someone the opportunity to at least dip a toe in the vast and lonely ocean that is the penal system.

And if you want the prison part to be temporary but would like to leave tethered to your very own ball and chain, how about tying the knot behind bars? As someone who has been married to and divorced from the same woman twice in a span of almost two decades, this particular idea both tickled and terrified me.

If you’d like to check a prison stay off your bucket list without complicating your life by acquiring a criminal record, there’s good news!

For $3,600 (midweek, Wednesday discount, includes seating for up to fifty-five of your closest friends. Officiant and refreshments not included), you can embark upon your matrimonial journey at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. For 142 years, Eastern State served as a maximum-security facility that housed notorious criminals such as one Alphonse Capone, as well as Willie Sutton who, asked why he robbed banks, replied famously (and accurately), “Because that’s where the money is!”

Decommissioned since 1971, Eastern State Penitentiary is now a historic site that rents itself out for, among other things, weddings. Lovebirds beware, though: the facility is not available for wintry or New Year’s nuptials. The cost of heating such an old, large and, one assumes, miserable place is cost-prohibitive, so bookings don’t begin until April.

Maybe my current station in life has me jaded, but I just don’t get it. I wouldn’t wish prison on anyone. Come to think about it, given my matrimonial record, I wouldn’t recommend that either, but to each his own.