Panopticon, The Big Brother of Prisons

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon Prison, may well have been born from the idea of syndics during the black plague in Europe. Michel Focault explains how this system was put into place and how it worked when the plague was discovered in a population in the opening paragraph of his essay “Panopticism”.

“First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death , the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors; it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The syndic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the outside; he takes the key with him and hands it over to the intendant of the quarter…” (61).

The idea behind the lockdowns was fear and threat of death. Syndics may not have even been present during some of the times when stepping outside was forbidden, but for fear of being killed, the townsfolk never took the chance to venture outside to find out whether or not the syndics were actually there. This is the same idea behind Bentham’s Panopticon Prison, which is essentially the “Big Brother” of all prisons.

The prison is described as having “at the periphery, and annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the perihperic building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower, the other on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other” (63). The idea was to place inmates in all of the cells and light them, while only putting one watchman in the tower, whom the inmates cannot see. It is the theory that the constant light and fear of being exposed will prevent bad behavior and actually keep the inmates in their cells because they have no idea how many watchmen or people can see their actions. It was the same idea with the syndics in the time of the plague. Townsfolk simply listened to the rules for fear of being seen, even if they couldn’t see the syndics, they never wanted to take the chance that they were there and would catch them sneaking out. As Focault describes it, “Visibility is a trap” (64).