The Panopticon – Jeremy Bentham’s Idea for a Perfect Prison

Jeremy Bentham, English philosopher and social theorist, never quite got over the rejection of his ideas for “the perfect prison”.  In fact, he was so disgruntled that he came up with the idea of sinister interest –the vested interests of the powerful that then conspire against a wider public interest.  That rings bells…

Regardless, his ideas were not original – there had been round prisons before – but he did live to see his own idea incorporated into a National Penitentiary (otherwise known as Millbank Prison) in the UK, which opened in 1821.  He wasn’t happy with that either.  After his death, the idea of radial prisons did take off – which most say owe a debt to Bentham’s Panopticon idea.

I won’t explain how the Pantopticon was meant to work – the video below (created by the very talented Myles Zhang) does a really good job of that.  The name hails from the Greek for “all seeing” – panoptes – and not from an old Tom Baker Doctor Who story (The Deadly Assassin if you’re interested).  It has become somewhat embedded in popular culture, a similar Panopticon appeared in one of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, too.

Back to Earth, perhaps it was pre-revolutionary Cuba that got the closest to Bentham’s original ideas when it built the Presidio Modelo in the 1920s.  However idealistic the plan, they soon went wrong.  When a young Fidel Castro found himself imprisoned there decades later, what was designed to be a space to hold 5,000 inmates at capacity was now “home” to over 6,000 with no running water and almost overflowing with the detritus of everyday life.  I guess the idea of “who watches the watcher” was as important then as Bentham thought it originally, but as the idea of the Panopticon only works in the authorities ensure that the watchers are watched, perhaps the idea was flawed from the get-go, in its assumption that human nature gives a damn.  If only he could see the future and the all-pervasive cameras that cover every inch of our cities. I wonder what he would make of them?

Perhaps he would resort to something he had already said - and one of my favourite quotes about the human condition to boot. That is “Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.”  Put kindly, we’re all a little too obsessed with progress to realise that what we currently have, after all, is not so bad.

Watch the video about the Panopticon below.