Architectural Design of the 19th-Century Panopticon’s

The 19th century had waaaay too many well-intentioned visionaries whose actual concepts led to horrifying conclusions. Among the sickening ideas is the Panopticon, created by the British philosopher Jeremy Benthem. He meant well — but his aims incorporated authoritarian mind-control.

From the Greek “all-seeing”, the Panopticon was a special sort of prison, designed for the benevolant purpose of having a population with, as he put it, “morals reformed- health preserved – industry invigorated- instruction diffused – public burdens lightened . . . . All by a simple idea in architecture!”.

And this architectural idea was a prison where the inmates were constantly under surveillance. From the building design plans on the second slide, you can see how this worked out: a central tower housed guards that could be hidden from view, but surrounding the tower were individual prison cells with only one opening: an exposed gate that looked out onto the tower but wouldn’t let the prisoners see any of their neighbors.

There, isolated and mindful of the potential eye of the guards, prisoners would internalize the all-seeing authority and start to regulate their own minds. This is every bit as horrifying as it sounds, and Bentham’s apparent naïvité at his Orwellian invention makes it no less so: he wrote about his “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind” as something “hitherto without example”. You can get something approaching the suffocating effects of isolation and authoritarian observance with the first image — a sketch as seen from behind a bound prisoner looking out into the guard tower of a Penopticon.

If you ever get the chance, I recommend touring the Prison Chapel of Lincoln Castle (images 3 and 4, which do not do it justice at all, sorry about the pun). Straight outta Bentham’s ideas, the chapel had each prisoner placed in an upright box whose walls extended such that they could only look forward onto the preacher — who had visibility of everyone. It was long ago, and grim, and inspirational to those who have imagined dystopias ever since.