Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison. From the centre, the manager or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates. The architecture consists of a rotunda with an inspection house at its centre.
Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.Īlthough it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. Plan of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison, drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791
