Panopticon

Overview

In 1787, Jeremy Bentham visited Russia to see his brother, Samuel, who was working as an engineer for Prince Potemkin, Prime Minister of Catherine the Great. At the time, Samuel Bentham was constructing a circular textile mill designed so that overseers could monitor their workers without being seen. Jeremy Bentham found this design intriguing and thought it would work well for other types of buildings, including prisons. He wrote several letters to a friend, in which he described his ideas for what he came to call the “Panopticon,” based on what he had seen in Russia. Printed in 1791, though never sold in bookstores, Bentham's letters and two postscripts written in 1790 and 1791 describe the architectural design and its possible application in detail.

Despite years of planning and lobbying by Bentham, a Panopticon prison was never been built in his home country of England. However, Panopticon-style prisons were built in Spain, Holland, the United States, and other parts of the world, including Cuba. Additionally, many of Bentham's ideas about the need for constant surveillance exist in corrections today, including video cameras or in-home confinement with electronic monitoring systems that control and monitor an inmate's whereabouts.

Theory

The Panopticon, as planned by Bentham, is a prison in which the jailer or a guard can view all the inmates in their cells without being seen himself. Ideally, inmates would be watched at all times. However, Bentham recognized that constant surveillance was not possible. Instead, the Panopticon would make each inmate unsure of whether he or she was being viewed. Such ambiguity would make prisoners feel as if they were always being watched.

Bentham believed that constant surveillance would both punish and reform inmates. It would also make them efficient workers. Each person would behave in a way that he or she thought acceptable to the prison guard simply because the guard might be watching. Prisoners would also work hard at whatever task they were set, to avoid reprimand and punishment. Gradually, they would become [Page 664]better citizens, because they would be more aware of others and learn and have practice in behaving in socially acceptable ways. Furthermore, the solitary situation of each prisoner would help the inmate consider his or her wrongdoing and repent.

Architecture

The omnipresence of the guard in the Panopticon is created through its architecture. The Panopticon was to be a circular building of several stories. The cells would be placed along the circumference of the building, and the prison guard or inspector would occupy the center of the prison, allowing him to view each of the cells around and above him.

In the Panopticon, each cell would be shaped like a pie wedge with the point cut off. Each cell would be partitioned from the one next to it by a wall protruding from the outer wall of the prison toward the center, in the form of radii. The outer edge of the cell, the one along the outer edge of the prison building, would have a window. According to Bentham, this window would be large enough to provide light to the inmate's cell and to the guard's area in the center of the prison. As a result, the Panopticon would reverse the principles of the dungeon, because the prisoners would be kept in the light instead of the dark. However, since the prisoners would never know whether they were being watched, they would be in the dark in another sense.

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