Friday, April 27, 2012

Foucault's Panopticon Versus Crawfordsville's Rotary Jail

Michael Foucault uses the panopticon as a paradigm for disciplinary technology. What is a panopticon, however? In short, it is a prison. In the design, it has a large courtyard area with a tower in the middle. This is surrounded by several buildings that are made up of different levels and cells. An observer or dwells in the tower and is able to keep surveillance over all of the inmates in the cells. This design and concept is successful not only because it allows minimal guards to observe the inmates, but also because the inmates never truly know when they are being watched. This causes the inmates to act appropriately at all times, since there is always that chance of them being watched. The panopticon causes the prisoner to become his own gaurdian, which therefore makes the guards job that much easier and more efficient. Along with controlling the prisoners, Foucault comments on how the panopticon includes a system for observing and controlling the controller, and Foucault sees this as being the most diabolical aspect of the design.

In visiting the rotary jail in Crawfordsville, Indiana, there was immediately a dichotomy between the rotary jail and the panopticon. The rotary jail was in explicit contrast to Bentham's panopticon. This Crawfordsville jail had all of the prisoners in the center on a round turntable that was split into individual cells. The guard would stand on the outside and hand-crank the turntable so that he could observe all of the prisoners without walking around. This design was very cool, but as can be thought, it was not effective as was the panopticon. There was no way to observe all of the inmates at once, and the prisoners knew when they were being observed. It is no surprise that there are no more rotary jails in use today, because they were just not successful enough. Although the rotary jail is a interesting design and cool place to visit, it simply does not compare to the panopticon.

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