The Contradictions of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon Penitentiary 1

The term 'Panopticon' has been used more or less loosely, since Jeremy Bentham first coined the word, to refer to any prison -or indeed any other kind of institutional building -which has a centralised plan and some sort of observation post at the middle. 2But if we take the word to apply more narrowly to cylindrical prisons along the lines that Bentham himself imagined, then very few have ever been built.There were three panopticons erected in Holland in the late nineteenth century, all of which survive. Figure 1 shows the Koepelgevangenis [cupola prison] at Arnhem, designed by J F Metzelaar. 3 Perhaps the best-known true panopticons ever constructed were at the Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet in Illinois (Figure 2), where there were five rotundas within the one prison, built between 1916 and 1924.The architect was W. Carbys Zimmerman.All but one have since been demolished.Stateville was the model in turn for a prison on the Isle of Pines in Cuba, opened in 1931.And that is about it. 4 Meanwhile hundreds of prisons were built across the world throughout the 1 Based on a public lecture given at UCL, 20 February 2007. 2 Bentham set out his ideas for the Panopticon in a series of letters written from Russia to 'a friend' in England (in fact his father) in 1787.These were later supplemented by two much longer 'postscripts'.