2
Penal Philosophy: Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and Eastern State Penitentiary
Eric Schott
Social Studies department
Avon Grove High School
West Grove, PA
NEH Seminar 2004
With the United States second only to Rwanda in the relative number of people incarcerated it would seem that prison reform is a particularly relevant topic. However, it did not even appear in a recent top ten poll of challenges confronting the United States. (America votes 2004) For whatever reason, the approximately 2.1 million people in U.S. prisons are not a leading issue in the 2004 presidential election. In the mid-17th century, however, penal philosophy was the subject of much discussion and publication. (Office of Justice) In 1791, the famous utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham wrote a short work on prison construction and philosophy entitled Panopticon or The Inspection House. While this idea was never fully acted upon, Bentham’s book did influence prison construction and philosophy for the next one hundred years throughout the world and particularly in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with the construction of Eastern State Penitentiary.
Just as the Reformation brought the ideas of the Renaissance to a wider audience the Enlightenment popularized the Age of Scientific Discovery. If rational thought and careful observation could unlock the secrets of nature, then perhaps man could be better understood through deduction and empiricism. The Enlightenment thinkers turned their humanistic eyes to every type of institution—religion, education and government. One of the areas most fascinating to these thinkers was prison design and reform.
Two hundred years ago warehousing large numbers of people at state expense was a relatively new phenomenon. Prisons were temporary holding pens until the suspect was tried. Debtors, the insane, beggars and persons convicted of minor offences might be confined but the idea of punishment through long-term incarceration was not practiced. Crimes such as murder, kidnapping and theft were dealt with in much harsher fashion. “The overwhelming proportion of criminal offences were without benefit of clergy, that is, they were punishable by death, fines, brandings, the usual forms of secondary punishment.” (Evans, p.24)
One of the people most responsible for changing society’s views on crime and punishment was Cesare Beccaria, the eldest son of an aristocratic family in Milan. After being exposed to the writings of David Hume, Thomas Hobbes and Charles Montesquieu, and studying the penal system, he published a treatise entitled On Crimes and Punishment in 1764. The book was well received in intellectual circles being read by Thomas Jefferson, Catherine of Russia and Voltaire; it stimulated debate on what could be done to criminals rather than grim public spectacle. Beccaria thought the current penal system needed vast reform citing the twin ideas of the social contract and utility. Punishment was justified only to defend the social contract; it should not be employed to exact a crude state vengeance. In regard to utility, he reasoned that the method of punishment selected should be that which serves the greatest good. The utilitarian approach stressed that a criminal should be penalized so as to ultimately increase the amount of happiness in the world. Beccaria saw imprisonment as a way to reform a criminal and ideally create more pleasure and less pain.
Utilitarianism was a system of ethics different than the more Christian deontological models since it sought righteousness not in the means of ethical choice but rather in the ends, the consequences. Described as the sire of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham was also a bit of an all purpose social reformer and gadfly in 18th century England. (He is also thought to be Charles Dicken’s inspiration behind the character of Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times.) While Bentham may have been guilty of being rationally overzealous he is also regarded as one of the great minds of the Enlightenment. John Stuart Mill was one of his disciples but also a keen critic who wrote this about Bentham in 1838, “ (He) spoke out, those who found our institutions unsuited to them did not dare say so, did not dare consciously to think so; they had never heard the excellence of those institutions questioned by cultivated men, by men of acknowledged intellect.” (Clark, p.1)
In 1769, Bentham read Beccaria’s work and was moved to systematically examine England’s methods of state punishment in an unpublished work titled, Plan of a Penal Code. It was not until 1785 that he returned to the ideas of criminology when he travelled to Russia to join his younger brother, Samuel, who was working for Prince Potemkin. Jeremy Bentham’s reasons for visiting the Ukraine were more than just familial; he hoped that the current Romanov, Catherine, would be as enlightened as advertised and perhaps be moved to employ his ideas in her prison system. But he was also interested in Samuel’s work on a supervisory blueprint that would keep tabs on unskilled workers. The younger Bentham had designed a building that allowed for one person, sitting at a rotating terminus, to watch a vast amount of people as they went about their activities, each in their own private workspace. From Samuel’s inspiration sprang Jeremy’s idea for the construction of a new type of detention house.
A building circular…The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference—The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the Inspector concealed…from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence—The whole circuit reviewable with little, or …without any, change of place. One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of any cell. (Werret , p.1)
What started out in a series of letters in 1787 eventually grew into three volumes entitled, Panopticon or The Inspection House. The Panopticon prison was an attempt to merge architecture and public administration with utilitarianism. (Dinwiddy, p.7) This “Inspection House” would be built with the wheel and spokes design that allowed for a central vantage point at the hub. The prisoners would be housed in cells that ran along the spokes of the wheel, and since a single person could monitor them all, the cost of running the facility would be low. .The terminus would be constructed so that the convicts would never be aware of the observation.
This “omnipresent surveillance” was necessary to help in the reform process because Bentham felt that rehabilitation could only happen if the prisoner was alone and meditating on his or her misdeeds. He also reasoned that bench work of some kind, shoemaking for instance, would be therapeutic as well as creating some wealth so the prison could be financially self-sustaining. Bentham felt private reflection and vocational education would be more effective if the prisoner believed his jailor was observing him.
It is obvious that, in all these instances, the more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose X of the establishment have been attained. Ideal perfection, if that were the object, would require that each person should actually be in the predicament of surveillance every instant of time. This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so. (Bentham, p.4)
In some respects, Bentham created a heavenly hierarchy within the Panopticon; the governor of the prison was, in a sense, God who watched over the guards, his angels (one could at least hope). At the bottom, of course, were the prisoners, or God’s children, who had strayed from the path. The governor of the prison “fulfils a role in a predictable system: A system that provides the basis for a rational order of things in a situation that, without such careful circumscription, was often rendered into a diabolical chaos by the irrationally disposed passions of man.” (Evans, p.22) Bentham had created a pleasure and pain quantification system called Felicific Calculus. If an individual is acting contrary to the will or desires of the majority, then that individual must be restrained by a certain amount of pain. The Panopticon was an attempt to remould human behaviour by strengthening individual defences against impulsive behaviour. Bentham wrote, “ Delinquents are a peculiar race of beings who require unremitted inspection. Their weakness consists in yielding to the seduction of the moment. Their minds are weak and disordered.” (Evans, p. 25)
As the prisoner pondered his wrongdoing, he would come to realize the mistakes he has made and would calculate a different life’s plan that would result in greater happiness for himself and others around him. .There was no need for greater cruelty than necessary, no need to make a hideous example of the transgressor, as was the custom in much of Europe up until the mid 1700’s.
While Catherine did not employ Bentham’s plan in Russia, the English government was interested and in 1794 the Panopticon received the official sanction of Parliament (though it was not until 1799 that a site for the prison was chosen at Milbank near Westminster). Bentham spent £10,000 of his own money on the site. He had already contracted for ironwork when political support for the project began to erode. Certain powerful landowners in the area of Milbank did not want a prison, even a model one, built in their backyard and they brought pressure to stop prison construction. In 1803, these opposition forces killed the project. The official explanation was that since Bentham planned to be the governor of the prison it would be unseemly for him to profit from the labor of criminals. (Plamenatz, p62.)
It is interesting to note that this experience in the world of hardball politics soured Bentham on constitutional monarchy and converted him to pure democracy. “He asked himself how it was that such a scheme, so obviously excellent and in the public interest, could come to be rejected. It became clear that those in authority had not the public interest at heart and that they were indifferent to it because they were not truly the agents of the public.” (Plamentz, p.63) Bentham’s investment was remunerated and he was also given £13,000 to compensate both his work and time.
Bentham attempted to sell the Panopticon idea to both the Irish and French governments but each time his plan was rejected. However, in the young American republic, what many have described as a nation borne out of the Enlightenment, there was receptivity to the idea of a new order of all things, even prisons. “Committees in various American states called for legislative reform that would enact utilitarian principles and humane practices discussed in Europe.” (Bowditch, p.5) One of these committees, The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, had Benjamin Franklin as an ally and Dr. Benjamin Rush as a lobbyist. This group was particularly interested in the Quaker idea of penitence. They persuaded the legislature of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania “to build a true penitentiary, a prison designed to create genuine regret and penitence in the criminal’s heart.” (History of Eastern State Penitentiary, p.1)
When in 1829, Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary opened, it was the most expensive American building of its day and it incorporated many of Bentham’s ideas. Strict isolation, supervised labor and daily meditation were all part of the regime. Seven cellblocks radiating from a central surveillance rotunda were just some of the features evident in the novel design. The penitentiary also had central heat, running water, flush toilets and skylights. Each cell had its own exercise yard but the prisoner saw no one and any attempt at communication with another person was severely punished. Prisoners were also forbidden to sing, whistle, cry or scream. It was expected that each inmate would spend his day working, meditating, and if he wanted to, reading The Bible. The prison’s architect, John Haviland, called Eastern State “A machine of reform.” (History of Eastern State Penitentiary, p.2)
From all over the world, prison designers journeyed to Philadelphia to study Eastern State Penitentiary’s structure and functionality. The United States was at the vanguard of penal reform and virtually all prisons designed in the 19th century world-wide copied one of the two US systems: New York or Pennsylvania. During the next 100 years over 300 prisons were built in South America, Europe and Asia based on the Eastern State model. (History of Eastern State Penitentiary, p.2) While the Bentham brothers’ radical architectural model proved popular the regimen of solitary confinement and reflection proved difficult for the prisoners to sustain and tough for the guards to enforce. Prisoners tried to communicate with each other with tapping stones on the wall or singing.
In 1831, soon after the opening of Eastern State, Alexander de Tocqueville and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont wrote a report to the French government.
Thrown into solitude the prisoner reflects. Placed alone, in view of his crime, he learns to hate it; and if his soul be not yet surfeited with crime, and thus have lost all taste for anything better, it is in solitude, where remorse will come to assail him. Can there be a combination more powerful for reformation than that of a prison which hands over the prisoner to all the trials of solitude, leads him through reflection to remorse, through religion to hope; makes him industrious by the burden of idleness…? (History of Eastern State Penitentiary, p.3)
However, de Tocqueville also voiced reservations about the efficacy of the Benthamite-Quaker system. He wondered if a life long devotion to crime was going to be so easily and quickly eradicated; to make a virtuous man out of a criminal was a task that seemed unlikely to succeed. (Schwartz, p.10)