A Building That Watches
1791 · Bentham, who has designed the Panopticon, a prison where inmates never know if they are watched
The prisons of his country are a scandal and he can prove it. Men are chained in the dark, jailers are paid by the prisoner and starve them for profit, and reform has been argued for thirty years by people with no plan.
He has a plan, and it is a building. Cells around the wall, all lit, all visible; an inspector's tower at the center with screens so that the man inside cannot be seen. Nobody in a cell can ever know whether they are being watched at that moment. So they behave as though they always are.
It would end the chains, the darkness and the beatings, because none of it is needed once the design does the work. It costs a fraction of what a prison costs. He is prepared to fund it himself and to live on the site.
He has also written that the same principle applies to factories, to schools, to hospitals, and to the workhouses of the poor.
He can put it to the government or he can drop it and spend those years on something else.
Put it to the government
Drop itOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Bentham pushed the Panopticon for over twenty years and much of his own fortune, and it was never built in his lifetime; Parliament eventually paid him compensation for the land and the wasted effort. The principle outlived the building. In 1975 Foucault made it the central image of how modern institutions work: that the cheapest way to control people is to make surveillance uncertain, so they do the watching themselves. Bentham had proposed it not only for prisons but for factories, schools, hospitals and the poor. The same man wrote the argument that ended with the question of whether animals can suffer, and a defense of decriminalizing homosexuality that he then put in a drawer for a hundred and fifty years.
The philosophers weigh in
Build it"People are not born good, and a system that assumes they are produces the chains he is trying to remove. He is only proposing to shape behavior deliberately instead of pretending it is not being shaped at all."
Drop it"He has designed a room in which you are never certain you are unobserved, and offered it to schools. Ask any woman raised under a version of that what it does to a person, and how long it takes to undo."