The Inspection House

An Impertinent Field Guide to Modern Surveillance

COACH HOUSE BOOKS

Contents

Millbank Prison

The 1850 Hand-Book of London, a traveller's guidebook, describes Millbank Prison like this: 'A mass of brickwork equal to a fortress, on the left bank of the Thames, close to Vauxhall Bridge ... It was designed by Jeremy Bentham, to whom the fee-simple of the ground was conveyed, and is said to have cost the enormous sum of half a million sterling.'

Millbank was still under construction when it opened in 1816. It was built on the marshy banks of the south side of the Thames, close enough to London for convenience but isolated enough to avoid complaints from neighbours. The layout was complex: a central tower was surrounded by a hexagon of walls, each segment of which was the base of a further pentagon of walls, with open exercise yards inside them. Each yard was watched over by its own four-storey tower. Seen from above in maps of the day, the prison resembles a barbed flower with six pentagonal petals, surrounded by a wall and moat that enclose the full sixteen-acre site.

It was a troubled project. The soggy terrain caused severe delays and cost two lead architects their jobs between 1812 and 1815. Budget overruns nearly doubled the original estimate of £259,700. Work was finally finished in 1821, but the prison didn't last long. Harsh conditions and surrounding marshland caused disease to sweep through the population, and an epidemic led to a complete evacuation in 1823. Even when people weren't getting sick, the design itself was fatally flawed. The labyrinthine network of corridors was so confusing that the prison's own warders sometimes got lost, and the echoing ventilation system transmitted sound so well that prisoners used it for illicit communication. By 1842, a newer prison, Pentonville, had been built to serve as the national penitentiary, and Millbank became a holding cell for convicts being shipped to Australia. It closed in 1890.

Bentham

The 1850 Hand-Book of London is wrong. Bentham did not design Millbank. As built, Millbank was designed by William Williams, drawing master at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. It was the winning entry in a contest held to replace Bentham's design, the final insult after two decades of failed effort on Bentham's part to get his own revolutionary ideas set in stone.

It is true that Bentham tried to build a prison on the site. In 1794 he was paid £2,000 by British prime minister William Pitt for preliminary work on the project. Selection of the intended site ran into technical and legal problems that seemed to be resolved when Bentham, using government money, bought the land at Millbank in 1799. But the project faltered again, Pitt resigned from office in 1801 and in 1803 the new administration decided not to proceed. Hope was briefly restored in 1811, when the government returned to the idea, but Bentham became convinced there was no real commitment to the proposal. While Millbank was being built, Bentham was suing the government for wasting his best years. He settled for £23,000.

In Bentham's proposal, there was no labyrinth of corridors to get lost in, and no echoing ventilation system to allow for covert communication. His design – which he called the Panopticon – was an altogether purer affair. The complete idea was described over the course of twenty-one letters written from White Russia in pvwv to his father, an attorney back in England. They were collected and published as a single volume in 1791.

Bentham imagined a circular building, with the inspector's tower (or 'lodge,' as he preferred to call it) in the centre and the cells arranged radially around it. The central tower houses the prison warden and his family. Each four-sided cell is completely cut off from its neighbours. The interior side facing the lodge is open (aside from floor-to-ceiling bars) and the exterior side has a view to the outside world through a window on the outer wall. These windows are large enough that they light not only the cells, but the inspector's lodge as well. The play of darkness and light is important here: the windows of the lodge are protected by a fine metal grate that will allow the inspector to see into the lit cell, but prevents the prisoner from seeing into the relatively low-lit inspector's area. Blinds and partitions further obscure the presence of the watcher. At night, artificial lights outside each window replicate the light of day so as to preserve this proto–one-way-mirror arrangement.

Panopticon; or The Inspection-House is a weird mixture of grand schemes and fine details. One moment, Bentham is talking about the distribution of profits from prison labour, and the next he's spending a half-dozen paragraphs working out how to run a system of gears through bent speaking tubes in order to drive a flag that will signal to prisoners that they're being talked to. Sometimes he's a salesman, sometimes a philosopher and sometimes a crank. He opens the letters with a bunch of hand-waving about the kind of stone and arches that would ensure the building will stay standing, and ends with a fanciful flight into imagining how the isolation systems of the Panopticon will allow you to raise and educate perfect virgin daughters to be ready for marriage. Not only the workings of light, but those of sound, heat and ventilation, are described in exacting detail.

Born in 1748, Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, social reformer and sometime lawyer, best known for his promulgation of the philosophy of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism preaches a moral framework based on encouraging actions that produce pleasure and discouraging those that produce pain. Acts that produce net pleasure must be good, and acts that produce net pain must be bad and ought to be avoided. Classical utilitarians like Bentham and John Stuart Mill (born 1806) were obsessed with the quantification of both joy and suffering, with the aim of producing institutions and social structures that minimized the latter.

Bentham – particularly in his later life – was a radical, advocating for women's equality, animal rights, separation of church and state, and the decriminalization of homosexuality. He was a fan of transparency and wanted people to be responsible for their own actions. He puts it like this in 1834's Deontology: 'It were to be wished that every man's name were written upon his forehead as well as engraved upon his door. It were to be wished that no such thing as secrecy existed – that every man's house were made of glass.' With transparency came accountability. 'The more men live in public,' he writes, 'the more amenable they are to the moral sanction.' The Panopticon was designed to make one particular class of people – convicted criminals – live very publicly.

Bentham's Panopticon is not just an exercise in radical transparency, it's also a labour-saving device. He's quite explicit on this point:

I flatter myself there can now be little doubt of the plan's possessing the fundamental advantages I have been attributing to it: I mean, the apparent omnipresence of the inspector (if divines will allow me the expression,) combined with the extreme facility of his real presence.

A collateral advantage it possesses, and on the score of frugality a very material one, is that which respects the number of the inspectors requisite. If this plan required more than another, the additional number would form an objection, which, were the difference to a certain degree considerable, might rise so high as to be conclusive: so far from it, that a greater multitude than ever were yet lodged in one house might be inspected by a single person; for the trouble of inspection is diminished in no less proportion than the strictness of inspection is increased.

From a central position of power, the unseen watchers potentially see all. The inmates, subjected to the whims of their guards and at peril of brutal reprisal for any wrongdoing, must assume they are being watched at all times. Because they are kept isolated, they are unable to coordinate any kind of resistance. They become their own jailers, forced into docility by clever construction techniques.

With such conditions persuading the prison's charges to self-discipline, fewer paid guards would be needed. It was also, Bentham believed, a less cruel solution than the alternative. In a classic win-win pitch, he argues that the Panopticon would reduce the costs of running the place (perfect security would allow you to get by with the thinnest of walls) while ending the need for restraining mechanisms like chains and irons.

If you were to be asked who had most cause to wish for its adoption, you might find yourself at some loss to determine between the malefactors themselves, and those for whose sake they are consigned to punishment.

In this view I am sure you cannot overlook the effect which it would have in rendering unnecessary that inexhaustible fund of disproportionate, too often needless, and always unpopular severity, not to say torture – the use of irons. Confined in one of these cells, every motion of the limbs, and every muscle of the face exposed to view, what pretence could there be for exposing to this hardship the most boisterous malefactor?

It must have galled Bentham to watch Millbank be built and fail as he pressed his suit against the government. That prison turned out to be essentially the anti-Panopticon. The thick walls and confusing layout weakened the warders' ability to monitor their charges, a problem only exacerbated by the badly designed ventilation system, allowing the convicts to coordinate and take liberties. Those liberties would have been met with the excesses of force from the guards and other unnecessary cruelties, leading to the harsh conditions that in turn led to the outbreak that caused the prison's evacuation.

No disease would have been allowed to proliferate in Bentham's Panopticon, like it did at Millbank. Bentham was certain that the Panopticon would have made an excellent hospital. In fact, Bentham saw the Panopticon as a one-size-fits-all solution for any institution. He had big dreams for his pet project, imagining it used for asylums, hospitals, factories, schools and workhouses:

No matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education: in a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary-houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools.

The Panopticon was conceived as a universal instrument, endlessly flexible and able to mould its inhabitants in any way the administrators required.

Foucault

Michel Foucault elevated the panopticon from failed scheme to governing metaphor. Foucault was a French thinker, particularly interested in the structures and dynamics of power and knowledge. In 1975, he published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, known to us as Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

Examining Bentham's plans, he saw those same labour-saving power structures woven into the fabric of 1970s society. In turn, academia followed Foucault, and the term panopticon was picked up and adopted in surveillance studies (a field of study that didn't truly begin until after Foucault's death, with Canadian sociologist David Lyon's work in the late 1980os), and eventually bled into common discourse. It is now more closely associated with Foucault than with Bentham, the idea's originator. Foucault brought the metaphor to bear on his own society and opened the door for generations of surveillance scholars to do the same.

For Foucault, the panopticon is the pinnacle of what he called the disciplinary society, the ideal that the Enlightenment rationalists of the eighteenth century were attempting to achieve. At the time, the outmoded practices of yesteryear were being rethought and replaced with new, rational solutions. The panopticon is the symbol for the shift from public punishment of criminals to the confinement and training of inmates, moulding them into good citizens. It has remained one of the most recognizable touchstones of Foucault's work, and consequently the most familiar part of Bentham's own philosophical output (with the possible exception of his willed request to have his skeleton mounted, clothed and displayed at University College London, which is pleasingly wacky).

In Discipline & Punish, Foucault traces the gradual changeover of penal practices in the eighteenth century. He contrasts the ancien régime's public punishment with the disciplinary regime of confinement in prisons. (For historians, the ancien régime refers to the political and social system in France before the Revolution of 1789. Confusingly, Foucault borrows the name and reapplies it to mean European society in general during roughly that same period – this is just one of the reasons Foucault makes historians cranky.) In the ancien régime, punishment, torture and even death were meted out upon the criminal body, often before the observing masses. Foucault connects this type of practice to the former sovereign regimes of France, as the punishments were carried out under royal authority. The public execution is the ultimate expression of this system of administration. Punitive practice was performed in public to discourage further crime, and punishments were devised specifically to suit each crime. In the eighteenth century, Foucault says, there was a transition to a disciplinary society, where punishment was regularized and universalized. No matter what the crime, the punishment is always confinement in a prison for a fixed duration of time. Now, rather than the body being punished directly, the body is imprisoned and it is the 'soul' of the prisoner that is submitted for improvement.

The panopticon is the inflexion point and the culmination point of this new regime. It is the platonic ideal of the control the disciplinary society is trying to achieve. Operation of the panopticon does not require special training or expertise; anyone (including the children or servants of the director, as Bentham suggests) can provide the observation that will produce the necessary effects of anxiety and paranoia in the prisoner. The building itself allows power to be instrumentalized, redirecting it to the accomplishment of specific goals, and the institutional architecture provides the means to achieve that end.

The operation of carceral power is not simple to apply, however. 'For this operation,' Foucault writes, 'the carceral apparatus has recourse to three great schemata: the politico-moral schema of individual isolation and hierarchy; the economic model of force applied to compulsory work; the technico-medical model of cure and normalization. The cell, the workshop, the hospital. The margin by which the prison exceeds detention is filled in fact by techniques of a disciplinary type. And this disciplinary addition to the juridical is what, in short, is called the "penitentiary."'

For instance, a boarding school relies on isolation and hierarchy, as well as compulsory work (the cell and the workshop). An asylum works on the technico-medical level, as well as hierarchy, so it combines the hospital and the cell. A prison factory covers all three of the categories: inmates are confined and isolated from the general population, they are required to work, and their behaviours and health are monitored and normalized.

Power

Anyone reading Foucault will at least come out with this digestible nugget of his thought: power is a diffuse force, enacted and embodied by its users, existing in discourse. In Foucault's conception, power isn't concentrated in moments of coercion or domination, it is exerted constantly by everyone. Power is not applied only by leaders to ensure cooperation by underlings, it is practised by all.

His concept is so radical, it takes some effort to apply it to the panoptic prison. At first glance, it seems like the director in the panopticon clearly must have all the power: he is the one who looks. The prisoners are merely watched; they cannot even communicate amongst themselves. This looks like a classic, top-down coercive power structure. But Foucault thinks it describes the break from punitive 'sovereign' power and the shift to 'disciplinary' power. The objective of disciplinary power is to produce a docile, regulated and predictable body. Once someone is properly disciplined (by a combination of the physical architecture of the building and the surveillance it encourages, in the panopticon's case), she acts as her own jailer; she monitors herself.