Carceral tropes in prison-themed escape rooms in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Escape rooms have grown in popularity across the world, with a number of these sites established in decommissioned sites of confinement or operating in purpose built faux-prisons. Drawing on fieldwork in prison-themed escape rooms across Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, this article explores how these tourism and leisure sites contribute to meaning-making vis-à-vis imprisonment and punishment. Beyond examining how these games allow game players to consume punishment at a safe distance from the realities of imprisonment, we show how these venues of penal spectatorship commodify major elements of penality, notably by using wrongful imprisonment and the prospect of death behind bars as carceral tropes. This process of commodification distorts and skews the realities of these phenomena, reinforcing hegemonic views of the punitive injustice apparatus. While the prison escape room experience is meant to entertain and though some sites offer surface-level criticisms of penality, our findings show how these sites reproduce carceral logics that sustain imprisonment as a central practice of exclusion in contemporary times.