When Bentham's Idea Became Concrete
Jeremy Bentham never saw his exact Panopticon prison realized as he imagined it. The idea survived anyway. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, architects and governments experimented with radial prisons, circular prisons and institutions influenced to varying degrees by the central-inspection principle. The distinction matters because not every circular prison was a true Benthamite Panopticon. But the concept had escaped its creator. The Netherlands Circular penitentiaries were constructed in places including Arnhem, Breda and Haarlem. Their great domed interiors created an unmistakable spatial hierarchy. Cells surrounded an open central space. Authority occupied the center. The incarcerated occupied the circumference. Yet physical construction exposed one of Bentham's problems: perfect surveillance was harder to achieve in practice than on paper. Some supposedly panoptic prisons did not provide the unobstructed observation Bentham's theoretical model dema...