C-Ville's Panopticon

Our class has recently been reading the works of Michel Foucault, specifically those that deal with prisons and the power relations therein.  Foucault was especially interested in Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon, with its radical attempt to force the prisoner to become complicit in his own self-censorship.  With this in mind, we visited the Rotary Jail Museum in Crawfordsville to apply a Foucauldian analysis to its architecture. 

The prison block of the cell was not an ideal representation of Bentham's Panopticon.  It had a central tower, but this consisted of cells for prisoners, with catwalks along the column's side.  There was no guard tower surrounded by a perimeter of cells, all visible to the guard.  Because of this design, the prisoners must not have been continually visible to the officials, as Bentham dreamed would be the situation in his ideal prison.  But although the architecture of the Rotary Jail was not a perfect match of that of the Panopticon, its design still lends itself to a compelling analysis of power relations.  Because of the rotating tower and single entrance/exit, interaction between the prisoners and guards would be minimized.  This decrease of time spent under the gaze is directly contradictory to what Bentham hoped to achieve, but this theme of denial of attention is found in Foucault's work.  He speaks of the method practiced by asylum authorities in which they pointedly ignored the rants of patients under their care.  In this way, they would not legitimize the rant by attending to it, and this would force the patient to change their behavior, if they wanted any attention.  But although the same methods were practiced by the asylum authorities mentioned in Foucault's work and the Rotary Jail officials, the motivation behind them seems to have been different.  Where in Foucault, this practice was undertaken in an effort to modify the behavior of the patients, in the jail it was most likely undertaken to minimize risks to the guards.  There does not seem to be any rehabilitative aspect to it.  But in any case, the prisoners in the Rotary Jail and the asylum patients were most probably good examples of what Foucault defines as "docile bodies," bodies which have been conditioned to become passive and "useful."  The asylum patients were released once they submitted to the behavioral conditioning of the resident psychiatrists and became, in the psychiatrist's view, no longer a threat to society, if not necessarily a productive member.  And the prisoners in the jail, by their incapacitation and lack of attention, had no other choice but to submit to the power of the prison authorities, so it may be assumed that at least some of them became "docile."