Jeremy Bentham

Inventor of the Useful Panopticon

By Lynn A. Granata

Who was Jeremy Bentham?  Well let's begin with a brief explanation that he was an English philosopher and social theorist who lived in the 18th century.

What he did would change the landscape for the architecture of global prisons to what it has become today. A (pan) meaning all and (opticon) meaning a single watchman is a building structure that is built so that several elevations of floors inside of a prison have corridors of single cells within each unit.  In reality there is no actual watchman, but the design was intended to trick prisoners into believing that they were being watched at all times. Thus, it was thought that prisoners had really no way of knowing that they were being watched, and so they would naturally have to keep their activities under strict control, for fear of getting caught and punished again and again.

An illustration of elevation, section, and plan of the
first panopticon developed in England year 1791.