Rotary Jail

In our trip to the Rotary Jail of Crawfordsville, Indiana I was surprised by how it was the sheriff’s living unit and a prison in the same building.  We took this trip after reading about Foucault and the theory of the gaze.  It was interesting how the jail was set up, instead of a guard being in the middle of the jail—at a view point where he could see all the prisoners—he was on the outside.  Think of an inverted Panopticon, making it more difficult to keep an eye on prisoners.  This was evident by the stories our tour guide told us about escapes where a prisoner waited right outside the gate and attacked the guard.  The fact that rotary jails put the guards at such a disadvantage when it came to monitoring prisoners is probably why they are no longer in use today.  Foucault’s theory of the gaze was not extremely well represented here in the rotary jail, but the aspects of taking in the ‘others’ from society and attempting to normalize them was seen.  The latter is also another theory Foucault had, that prisoners were taken into jails and made to be useful and passive in order to become a productive member of society.