National Museum of Crime & Punishment: Wikis

Note: Many of our articles have direct quotes from sources you can cite, within the Wikipedia article! This article doesn't yet, but we're working on it! See more info or our list of citable articles.

Encyclopedia

Updated live from Wikipedia, last check: June 03, 2012 17:08 UTC (46 seconds ago)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

National Museum of Crime & Punishment

Established	May 23, 2008
Location	575 7th St. NW Washington, DC 20004
Website	www.crimemuseum.org

The National Museum of Crime & Punishment is a privately owned museum dedicated to the history of criminology and penology in America.^[1]^[2] It is located in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, D.C., half a block south of the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro station. The museum, which opened in May 2008, was built by Orlando businessman John Morgan in partnership with John Walsh, host of America's Most Wanted, at a cost of US$21 million.^[2]

More than 700 artifacts in 28,000 square feet (2,600 m²) of exhibition space relate the history of crime and the consequences of crime in America and in American popular culture.^[3]^[4] The museum features exhibits on colonial crime, pirates, Wild West outlaws, gangsters, the Mob, mass murderers, and white collar criminals. Twenty-eight interactive stations include the high-speed police chase simulators used in the training of law enforcement officers, and a Firearms Training Simulator (F.A.T.S.) similar to that utilized by the FBI.^[5]

1 Museum Galleries
2 America's Most Wanted Studio
3 References
4 External links

Museum Galleries

The main floor is devoted to a staged crime scene investigation where a murder has taken place. Visitors to the museum are guided through the process of solving the crime through forensic science techniques, including ballistics, blood analysis, finger printing and foot printing, and dental and facial reconstruction.^[6]

The museum includes a mock police station with a booking room, celebrity mug shots, police line-up, lie detector test, prisoners' art and self-created devices for injury and escape, and a re-creation of the jail cell of Al Capone at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. A capital punishment room offers a re-creation of a guillotine and gas chamber, along with an authentic lethal injection machine from the state prison in Smyrna, Delaware, and an electric chair from the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville which was used for 125 executions. ^[7]

The crime-fighting gallery draws attention to such notables as founding FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the legendary law enforcement agent Eliot Ness. It also includes the uniforms, firearms, and restraining equipment of law enforcement officers, as well as exhibits on bomb squad and night vision technologies.

Medieval Gallery	Pirates Gallery	Wild West Shooting Gallery	Bonnie and Clyde Death Car
Mob Gallery	Serial Killers Gallery	America's Most Wanted Television Studio	Crime and the Media Gallery
Mock crime scene	CSI footprints	CSI Reconstruction Techniques	The CSI Experience
An electric chair	Harley Davidson police motorcycle	A jail cell	Staircase in the museum

America's Most Wanted Studio

The museum also serves as the television studio for America's Most Wanted, a long-running television series that dramatizes unsolved crimes. The television program has led to the capture of more than 1,000 fugitives (16 from the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives) due to the crime tips that are reported by the public when criminals are profiled.^[8] Surrounding the studio are exhibits on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and McGruff the Crime Dog, as well as a Cross Match Technologies station for child finger printing.