Panopticon - Panopticon Prison Designs

Panopticon Prison Designs

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 —Ben and Marthalee Barton

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 feature of Bentham's design was that the custodians should be able to view the prisoners at all times (including times when they were in their cells), but that the prisoners should be unable to see the custodians, and so would never know when 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 nineteenth-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 twentieth-century technological developments – notably closed-circuit television (CCTV) – but these eliminated the need for a specific architectural framework.

The Panopticon is widely, but erroneously, believed to have influenced the design of Pentonville Prison in North London, Armagh Gaol in Northern Ireland, and Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. These, however, were Victorian examples of the Separate system, which was more about prisoner isolation than prisoner surveillance; in fact, the separate system makes surveillance quite difficult.

Many modern prisons are built in a "podular" designinfluenced by the Panopticon design, in intent and basic organization if not in exact form.