Panopticon
Definition
Jeremy Bentham's 1791 design for an institution built around a central observation tower, letting a single supervisor watch many inmates who cannot tell when they are being watched.
Related terms
- Auburn System
- Also called the silent system, a regime combining solitary night cells with daytime congregate labour under an absolute rule against speech, developed...
- Congregate Labour
- Work performed by prisoners together in shared workshops during the day, the defining feature of the Auburn system, as opposed to solitary...
- Corporal Punishment
- Punishment inflicted on the body, such as flogging, branding or mutilation, historically administered in public as a deterrent.
- Danda
- The graded scheme of punishment set out in the Dharmashastra tradition, whose severity varied with the gravity of the offence and the...
- Lex Talionis
- The principle of proportionate retaliation, an injury for an equivalent injury, codified in the Code of Hammurabi and the Hebrew Bible.
- Penitentiary
- An institution built on the idea that isolation, labour and religious instruction could produce genuine penitence and reform an offender's character, rather...
- Penitentiary Movement
- The early nineteenth-century reform movement that built prisons designed to induce penitence through labour, isolation and religious instruction rather than corporal pain.
- Pennsylvania System
- Also called the separate system, a regime of total individual isolation day and night, with solitary labour, refined at Eastern State Penitentiary...
- Beccaria
- Cesare Beccaria, author of the 1764 treatise On Crimes and Punishments, who argued punishment should be proportionate, certain and no crueller than...
- Bentham
- Jeremy Bentham, whose utilitarian framework judged punishment by whether it prevents more harm than it inflicts, and who designed the panopticon.
- Indeterminate Sentence
- A prison term without a fixed release date, set instead by a range that a parole authority narrows based on the prisoner's...
- Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems
- The two competing early American penitentiary regimes: solitary confinement at Eastern State Penitentiary versus congregate, silent labour at Auburn Prison.
Explained in these topics
- Penitentiary, Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems (UGC-NET Unit VIII)Jeremy Bentham's 1791 circular prison design with a central inspection tower, built on the idea that unverifiable surveillance keeps prisoners orderly with few...
- Penology and the Evolution of Punishment
- The Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems of Prison DisciplineA circular prison design published by Jeremy Bentham in 1791, with a central inspection tower from which a single guard could appear to observe every cell with...
- Punishment: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Times (UGC-NET Unit VII)Bentham's 1791 design for an institution built around a central observation tower, letting a single supervisor watch many inmates who cannot tell when they are...