Seven Odd Notions of Prison
People have been locking other people for years and years and years and, not surprisingly, people have tried going about this in a variety of strange and interesting ways. The problem gets tricky when you have a lot of people locked up together. Here are some approaches that people have taken that stray a bit from the good old familiar gray building with the towers and the walls and Burt Reynolds playing football in the yard.
Prison Concept #1: The Panopticon
Remember the HBO series “Oz“? In it the narrator, Augustus Hill, appears in a floating cube — essentially a glass cell where everyone sees everything. In addition, the unit he’s in, “Emerald City” was designed as a place where everyone could be seen at any time (although there were actually lots of nooks and crannies where Bad Things could and did happen. Turns out “Oz” absconded with a page from Jeremy Bentham.
Bentham proposed the Panopticon, a round prison building with a central guard tower. The cells would be backlit so that prisoners would be silhouetted, and guards in the tower would be shielded so that the prisoners would never know when they were really being watched. Paging George Orwell…
A schematic of the Panopticon as proposed by Bentham
A real panopticon in Cuba. Quaint!
It’s even more charming on the inside — what lovely light!
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