Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums. From the centre, the manager or staff are able to watch the inmates. The architecture consists of a rotunda with an inspection house at its centre. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates knowing whether or not 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 motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. This plan of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.
For other uses, see Panopticon (disambiguation).
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