The Panopticon is a type of institutional
building designed by the English philosopher
and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the
late 18th century. The concept of the design
is to allow a single watchman to observe all
inmates of an institution without the inmates
being able to tell whether or not they are
being watched. Although it is physically impossible
for the single watchman to observe all cells
at once, the fact that the inmates cannot
know when they are being watched means that
all inmates must act as though they are watched
at all times, effectively controlling their
own behaviour constantly. The name is also
a reference to Panoptes from Greek mythology;
he was a giant with a hundred eyes and thus
was known to be a very effective watchman.
The design consists of a circular structure
with an “inspection house” at its centre,
from which the manager or staff of the institution
are able to watch the inmates, who are stationed
around the perimeter. Bentham conceived the
basic plan as being equally applicable to
hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, daycares,
and asylums, but he devoted most of his efforts
to developing a design for a Panopticon prison,
and it is his prison which is most widely
understood by the term.
Bentham himself described the Panopticon as
“a new mode of obtaining power of mind over
mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”
Elsewhere, he described the Panopticon prison
as “a mill for grinding rogues honest”.
Conceptual history
Morals reformed—health preserved—industry
invigorated—instruction diffused—public
burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it
were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the
poor-law not cut, but untied—all by a simple
idea in Architecture!
In 1786 and 1787, Bentham travelled to Krichev
in White Russia to visit his brother, Samuel,
who was engaged in managing various industrial
and other projects for Prince Potemkin. It
was Samuel who conceived the basic idea of
a circular building at the hub of a larger
compound as a means of allowing a small number
of managers to oversee the activities of a
large and unskilled workforce. Jeremy began
to develop this model, particularly as applicable
to prisons, and outlined his ideas in a series
of letters sent home to his father in England.
He supplemented the supervisory principle
with the idea of contract management; that
is, an administration by contract as opposed
to trust, where the director would have a
pecuniary interest in lowering the average
rate of mortality.
The Panopticon was intended to be cheaper
than the prisons of his time, as it required
fewer staff; “Allow me to construct a prison
on this model,” Bentham requested to a Committee
for the Reform of Criminal Law, “I will
be the gaoler. You will see ... that the gaoler
will have no salary—will cost nothing to
the nation.” As the watchmen cannot be seen,
they need not be on duty at all times, effectively
leaving the watching to the watched. According
to Bentham's design, the prisoners would also
be used as menial labour walking on wheels
to spin looms or run a water wheel. This would
decrease the cost of the prison and give a
possible source of income.
The abortive Panopticon prison project
On his return to England from Russia, Bentham
continued to work on the idea of a Panopticon
prison, and commissioned drawings from an
architect, Willey Reveley. In 1791, he published
the material he had written as a book, although
he continued to refine his proposals for many
years to come. He had by now decided that
he wanted to see the prison built: when finished,
it would be managed by himself as contractor–governor,
with the assistance of Samuel. After unsuccessful
attempts to interest the authorities in Ireland
and revolutionary France, he started trying
to persuade the prime minister, William Pitt,
to revive an earlier abandoned scheme for
a National Penitentiary in England, this time
to be built as a Panopticon. He was eventually
successful in winning over Pitt and his advisors,
and in 1794 was paid £2000 for preliminary
work on the project.
The intended site was that authorized for
the earlier Penitentiary, at Battersea Rise;
but the new proposals ran into technical legal
problems and objections from the local landowner,
Earl Spencer. Other sites were considered,
including one at Hanging Wood, near Woolwich,
but all proved unsatisfactory. Eventually
Bentham turned to a site at Tothill Fields,
near Westminster. Although this was common
land, with no landowner, there were a number
of parties with interests in it, including
Earl Grosvenor, who owned a house on an adjacent
site and objected to the idea of a prison
overlooking it. Again, therefore, the scheme
ground to a halt. At this point, however,
it became clear that a nearby site at Millbank,
adjoining the Thames, was available for sale,
and this time things ran more smoothly. Using
government money, Bentham bought the land
on behalf of the Crown for £12,000 in November
1799.
From his point of view, the site was far from
ideal, being marshy, unhealthy, and too small.
When he asked the government for more land
and more money, however, the response was
that he should build only a small-scale experimental
prison—which he interpreted as meaning that
there was little real commitment to the concept
of the Panopticon as a cornerstone of penal
reform. Negotiations continued, but in 1801
Pitt resigned from office, and in 1803 the
new Addington administration decided not to
proceed with the project. Bentham was devastated:
“They have murdered my best days.”
Nevertheless, a few years later the government
revived the idea of a National Penitentiary,
and in 1811 and 1812 returned specifically
to the idea of a Panopticon. Bentham, now
aged 63, was still willing to be governor.
However, as it became clear that there was
still no real commitment to the proposal,
he abandoned hope, and instead turned his
attentions to extracting financial compensation
for his years of fruitless effort. His initial
claim was for the enormous sum of nearly £700,000,
but he eventually settled for the more modest
sum of £23,000. An Act of Parliament in 1812
transferred his title in the site to the Crown.
Bentham remained bitter about the rejection
of the Panopticon scheme throughout his later
life, convinced that it had been thwarted
by the King and an aristocratic elite. It
was largely because of his sense of injustice
that he developed his ideas of “sinister
interest”—that is, of the vested interests
of the powerful conspiring against a wider
public interest—which underpinned many of
his broader arguments for reform.
The National Penitentiary was indeed subsequently
built on the Millbank site, but to a design
by William Williams that owed little to the
Panopticon, beyond the fact that the governor's
quarters, administrative offices, and chapel
were placed at the centre of the complex.
It opened in 1816.
Panopticon prison designs
The building circular—A cage, glazed—a
glass lantern about the Size of Ranelagh—The
prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference—The
officers in the centre. By blinds and other
contrivances, the inspectors concealed […] from
the observation of the prisoners: hence the
sentiment of a sort of omnipresence—The
whole circuit reviewable with little, or if
necessary without any, change of place. One
station in the inspection part affording the
most perfect view of every cell.
The architecture incorporates a tower central
to a circular building that is divided into
cells, each cell extending the entire thickness
of the building to allow inner and outer windows.
The occupants of the cells are thus backlit,
isolated from one another by walls, and subject
to scrutiny both collectively and individually
by an observer in the tower who remains unseen.
Toward this end, Bentham envisioned not only
venetian blinds on the tower observation ports
but also maze-like connections among tower
rooms to avoid glints of light or noise that
might betray the presence of an observer.
No true Panopticon prisons to Bentham's designs
have ever been built. The closest are the
buildings of the now abandoned Presidio Modelo
in Cuba. Although most prison designs have
included elements of surveillance, the essential
elements of Bentham's design were not only
that the custodians should be able to view
the prisoners at all times, but also that
the prisoners should be unable to see the
custodians, and so could never be sure whether
or not they were under surveillance.
This objective was extremely difficult to
achieve within the constraints of the available
technology, which is why Bentham spent so
many years reworking his plans. Subsequent
19th-century prison designs enabled the custodians
to keep the doors of cells and the outsides
of buildings under observation, but not to
see the prisoners in their cells. Something
close to a realization of Bentham's vision
only became possible through 20th-century
technological developments—notably closed-circuit
television—but these eliminated the need
for a specific architectural framework.
It has been argued that the Panopticon influenced
the radial design of 19th-century prisons
built on the principles of the "separate system".
In these prisons control was exercised through
strict prisoner isolation rather than surveillance,
but they also incorporated a design of radiating
wings, allowing a centrally located guard
to observe the door of every cell.
Prisons for which a “Panoptic” influence
has been claimed
As noted above, none of these prisons—with
the arguable exception of the Presidio Modelo—are
true Panopticons in the Benthamic sense. In
some cases, the claims for any influence are
very dubious indeed, and seem to be based
on little more than the fact that the design
is circular.
Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail – Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, United States
Balassagyarmat Fegyház és Börtön – Balassagyarmat,
Hungary
The Bridewell – Edinburgh, Scotland
Carabanchel Prison – Madrid, Spain
El Palacio de Justicia y Cárcel de Vigo – Vigo,
Spain
Caseros Prison – Buenos Aires, Argentina
Palacio de Lecumberri – Mexico City, Mexico
Chi Hoa – Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Fleury-Mérogis Prison – Fleury-Mérogis,
France.
Huron Historic Gaol – Goderich, Ontario,
Canada
Insein Prison – Insein, Burma
Kilmainham Gaol – Dublin, Ireland
Koepelgevangenis – Arnhem, Netherlands
Koepelgevangenis – Breda, Netherlands
Koepelgevangenis – Haarlem, Netherlands
Lancaster Castle Gaol – Lancaster, England
Prisión Modelo – Barcelona, Spain
Mount Eden Prisons – Auckland, New Zealand
Okrąglak Areszt Śledczy w Toruniu – Toruń,
Poland
Old Bilibid Prison – Manila City Jail, Philippines
Old Provost – Grahamstown, South Africa
Panóptico – Bogotá Prison
Pelican Bay State Prison – Del Norte County,
California, United States
Port Arthur, Tasmania Prison Colony – Port
Arthur, Tasmania, Australia
Presidio Modelo – Isla de la Juventud, Cuba
Corradino Correctional Facilities - Paola,
Malta
Round House – Fremantle, Western Australia,
Australia.
Special Handling Unit – [1] Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines,
Quebec, Canada
Stateville Correctional Center – Crest Hill,
Illinois, United States
Twin Towers Correctional Facility – Los
Angeles, California, United States
Sachsenhausen concentration camp – Oranienburg,
Germany
Lapas Sukamiskin – Bandung, Indonesia
The Circle at Parramatta Prison – Sydney,
Australia
Other panoptic structures
Bentham always conceived the Panopticon principle
as being beneficial to the design of a variety
of institutions where surveillance was important,
including hospitals, schools, workhouses,
and lunatic asylums, as well as prisons. In
particular, he developed it in his ideas for
a "chrestomathic" school, in which teaching
was to be undertaken by senior pupils on the
monitorial principle, under the overall supervision
of the Master; and for a pauper “industry-house”.
A wooden Panopticon factory, capable of holding
5000 workers, was constructed by Samuel Bentham
in Saint Petersburg, on the banks of the Neva
River, between 1805 and 1808: its purpose
was to educate and employ young men in trades
connected with the navy. It burned down in
1818.
The Round Mill in Belper, Derbyshire, England,
is supposed to have been built on the Panopticon
principle with a central overseer. Designed
by William Strutt, and constructed in 1811,
it had fallen into disuse by the beginning
of the 20th century and was demolished in
1959.
The Worcester State Hospital, constructed
in the late 19th century, extensively employed
panoptic structures to allow more efficient
observation of the wards. It was considered
a model facility at the time.
The Panopticon has been suggested as an "open"
hospital architecture:
Hospitals required knowledge of contacts,
contagions, proximity and crowding ... at
the same time to divide space and keep it
open, assuring a surveillance which is both
global and individualising.
Criticism and the Panopticon as metaphor
Despite the fact that no Panopticon was built
during Bentham's lifetime, his concept has
prompted considerable discussion and debate.
Whereas Bentham himself regarded the Panopticon
as a rational and enlightened, and therefore
just, solution to societal problems, his ideas
have been repeatedly criticised by others
for their reductive, mechanistic and inhumane
approach to human lives. Thus, in 1841, Augustus
Pugin published the second edition of his
work, Contrasts, in which one plate showed
a "Modern Poorhouse", a bleak and comfortless
structure in which the pauper is separated
from his family, subjected to a harsh discipline,
fed on a minimal diet, and consigned after
death to medical dissection, contrasted with
an "Antient Poor House", an architecturally
inspiring religious institution in which the
pauper is treated throughout with humanity
and dignity. In 1965, American historian Gertrude
Himmelfarb published an essay, "The Haunted
House of Jeremy Bentham", in which she depicted
Bentham's mechanism of surveillance as a tool
of oppression and social control. Parallel
arguments were put forward by French psychoanalyst
Jacques-Alain Miller in an essay entitled
"Le despotisme de l'utile: la machine panoptique
de Jeremy Bentham", written in 1973 and published
in 1975.
Most influentially, the idea of the panopticon
was invoked by Michel Foucault, in his Discipline
and Punish, as a metaphor for modern "disciplinary"
societies and their pervasive inclination
to observe and normalise. "On the whole, therefore,
one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary
society in this movement that stretches from
the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social
'quarantine', to an indefinitely generalizable
mechanism of 'panopticism'". The Panopticon
is an ideal architectural figure of modern
disciplinary power. The Panopticon creates
a consciousness of permanent visibility as
a form of power, where no bars, chains, and
heavy locks are necessary for domination any
more. Foucault proposes that not only prisons
but all hierarchical structures like the army,
schools, hospitals and factories have evolved
through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon.
The notoriety of the design today stems from
Foucault's famous analysis of it.
Building on Foucault, contemporary social
critics often assert that technology has allowed
for the deployment of panoptic structures
invisibly throughout society. Surveillance
by CCTV cameras in public spaces is an example
of a technology that brings the gaze of a
superior into the daily lives of the populace.
Furthermore, a number of cities in the United
Kingdom, including Middlesbrough, Bristol,
Brighton and London have added loudspeakers
to a number of their existing CCTV cameras.
They can transmit the voice of a camera supervisor
to issue audible messages to the public. Similarly,
critical analyses of internet practice have
suggested that the internet allows for a panoptic
form of observation. ISPs are able to track
users' activities, while user-generated content
means that daily social activity may be recorded
and broadcast online.
Shoshana Zuboff used the metaphor of the panopticon
in her book In the Age of the Smart Machine:
The Future of Work and Power to describe how
computer technology makes work more visible.
Zuboff examined how computer systems were
used to track the behavior and output of workers.
She used the term panopticon because the workers
could not tell that they were being spied
on, while the manager was able to check their
work continuously. As the book was written
in 1988, Zuboff's arguments were based on
Dialog rather than the World Wide Web. Zuboff
argued that there is a collective responsibility
formed by the hierarchy in the Information
Panopticon that eliminates subjective opinions
and judgements of managers on their employees.
Because each employee’s contribution to
the production process is translated into
objective data, it becomes more important
for managers to be able to analyze the work
rather than analyze the people. Like a physical
Panopticon prison, some Information Communication
Technologies can make individuals feel as
though they are being watched at all times.
This can occur at home when a user is on the
internet and feels that nothing they do there
is private: it is as though they are inmates
in a Panopticon, forced to be constantly on
their best behaviour because of the possibility
of observation.
In 1991 Mohammad Kowsar used the metaphor
in the title of his book “The Critical Panopticon:
Essays in the Theatre and Contemporary Aesthetics”.
Derrick Jensen and Gerge Draffan's 2004 book
Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance,
and the Culture of Control seeks to demonstrate
how our society, by techniques like the use
of biometric passports to identity chips in
consumer goods, from nanoparticle weapons
to body-enhancing and mind-altering drugs
for soldiers, is being pushed towards a panopticon-like
state.
The panopticon has also become a symbol of
the extreme measures that some companies take
in the name of efficiency as well as to guard
against employee theft, documented in a 2009
paper by Max Haiven and Scott Stoneman entitled,
Wal-Mart: The Panopticon of Time and the 2014
book by Simon Head, Mindless: Why Smarter
Machines Are Making Dumber Humans that describes
conditions at an Amazon.com depot in Augsburg,
Germany. Both argue that catering at all times
to the desires of the customer can lead to
increasingly oppressive corporate environments
and quotas in which many warehouse workers
can no longer keep up with demands of management.
Literature and the arts
In Gabriel García Márquez's novella, Chronicle
of a Death Foretold, the Vicario brothers
spend three years in the “panopticon of
Riohacha” awaiting trial for the murder
of Santiago Nasar.
Angela Carter includes a critique of the Panopticon
prison system during the Siberian segment
of her novel Nights at the Circus.
Charles Stross's novel Glasshouse features
a technology-enabled panopticon as the novel's
primary location.
Jenni Fagan's novel The Panopticon is set
in a dystopian care home for chronic young
offenders, inspired by Bentham's Panopticon.
In the British science fiction series Doctor
Who, an assembly hall in the citadel of the
Time Lords–who observe the whole universe
without anyone in the universe knowing–is
called the “Panopticon.”
In DC Comics' JLA: Earth 2, the Crime Syndicate
of Amerika operates from a lunar base known
as the Panopticon, from which they routinely
observe everyone and everything on the Anti-matter
Earth.
In Battlefield 4, one of the single-player
missions and multi-player maps features a
prison constructed in the panopticon style.
In Batman: Arkham Origins, Blackgate prison
has a panopticon within the facility; and
Batman refers to himself, in a sense, as a
metaphorical panopticon to criminals and corrupt
cops.
Although not directly named, the telescreens
which are omnipresent in Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four of which “there was of course
no way of knowing whether you were being watched
at any given moment... you had to live...
in the assumption that every sound you made
was overheard, and, except in darkness, every
movement scrutinised.” are based on the
founding principle of the Panopticon.
The third location visited in Konami's 2004
video game Silent Hill 4: The Room is a cylindrical
prison modeled on the panopticon, used by
a cult to imprison and observe orphaned children
in cells arranged around a central guardhouse.
John Twelve Hawks' novel The Traveler uses
the Panopticon as the model for a universal
surveillance system. “All you need is a
Virtual Panopticon that monitors your population.
You aren't required to literally watch them
all the time, but the masses have to accept
that possibility and the inevitability of
punishment. You need the structure, the system,
the implicit threat that becomes a fact of
life.”.
In the video game Freedom Wars, what remains
of humanity in a post-apocalyptic future lives
in underground cities called "Panopticons",
which are surveilled to a totalitarian degree.
In another video game, Deus Ex, the panopticon
concept is alluded to in one of four possible
endings. Should the player decide to merge
with the Helios AI, in turn merging with all
nanotechnology and obtaining God-like status,
they will need to begin the amalgamation procedure
by accessing a computer console. The password
Helios gives the player to access this account
is "panopticon".
E. Lockhart's novel The Disreputable History
of Frankie Landau-Banks uses the panopticon
as a major theme. The titular character learns
about panopticons in one of her classes and
uses the idea to represent the security at
her own school.
In the TCG Magic: The Gathering, on the plane
of Mirrodin, there is a tower in the core
of the world called Panopticon where the being
Memnarch can observe almost any place on the
plane at any given time through the eyes of
roving machines called Myr.
The 2004 album Panopticon by post-metal band
Isis is titled after the concept and the album's
lyrics explore many implications of Bentham's
ideas.
The second song on the Smashing Pumpkins album
Oceania is called Panopticon
The first episode of the fourth season of
Person of Interest is called Panopticon, referencing
the ubiquitous surveillance in place.
The 2014 film Guardians of the Galaxy features
a prison modeled after the Panopticon.
See also
Panopticism
Total institution
Mass surveillance
PRISM
Sousveillance
Omniscience
Right to privacy
References
Bibliography
Bentham, Jeremy. Božovič, Miran, ed. The
Panopticon Writings. London: Verso. ISBN 185984958X. 
Evans, Robin. The Fabrication of Virtue: English
prison architecture, 1750–1840. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. pp. 193–235.
ISBN 0521239559. 
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
ISBN 0679752552. 
Semple, Janet. Bentham's Prison: a Study of
the Panopticon Penitentiary. Oxford: Clarendon
Press. ISBN 0198273878. 
External links
Panopticon – by Jeremy Bentham
Panopticon; or, The inspection house: on Internet
Archive
Special Issue on the Panopticon – Surveillance
and Society
Control and Surveillance from Computers In
Society – Online course
[2] John Bowring, The Works of Jeremy Bentham,
vol. 4. This is the volume that contains Bentham's
writings on the Panopticon.
Simon Werrett “The Panopticon in the Garden”
– Essay on the Russian origins of the Panopticon
Cascio, Jamais The Rise of the Participatory
Panopticon
