Panopticism
▣ Description of a town where the plague appeared
- a strict spatial partitioning
- ceaseless inspection based on permanent registration
▣ In enclosed, segmented space, every individual was observed at every point, all actions and events they made were surveiled and recorded in the era of plagues. and Bentham's Panopticon followed the characters mentioned just before.
▣ The principle of Panopticon
- an annular building at the periphery which consists of separated cells
- a tower at the center which is pierced with wide windows facing the inner side of the ring-shaped cells.
- continual observation by the trap of visibility
▣ The major effect of the Panopticon
- To induce in the prisoner a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power
- As for observers, Seeing without being seen
- As for prisoners, Regarding themselves to be seen all the time
▣ The role and the aim of the Panopticism
- To amplify and strengthen the social forces, that is, to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality
▣ The extension of the disciplinary institutions and the result
1) The functional inversion of the disciplines: to neutralize dangers → to increase the possibility of individuality
2) The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms: from the closed fortlesses(from the massive, compact disciplinaries) to flexible methods of control
3) The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline: to fill the gaps between institutions and link them together, guaranteeing an interstitial discipline and a meta-discipline
Prison-Complete and austere institutions
▣ The prison had already been born before its systematic use in the penal system.
▣ The foundation of the prison
- the simple form of deprivation of liberty - an egalitarian punishment
▣ The principles of the perfect reformatory(a kind of prison for juveniles)
1) The isolation of the convict: from the external world, from everything that motivated the offence(crimes), from the complicities that facilitated it.
2) Identification of work as an agent of carcera transformation with the work snatching the inmates from the fatal idleness
3) An instrument for the modulation of the penalty - possibility of changing the duration of the punishment
▣ The characters of the prison
1) the place where the penalty is carried out
2) the place of observation of punished individuals
3) the place whose task was to constitute a prison-machine
4) A system of individualizing and permanent documentation
In conclusion,
The prison, the darkest region in the apparatus of justice, is the place where the power to punish, which no longer dares to manifest itself openly, silently organizes a field of objectivity in which punishment will be able to function openly as treatment and the sentence be inscribed among the discourses of knowledge.(256)