The Prison Panopticon

The first type of Panopticon is the Prison Panopticon where it is an architectural blueprint meant to be a prison. It is supposed to be a circular building with a central watchtower where the “watcher” or inspector oversees the prisoners in cells. Simply put, it looks like a doughnut-shaped building where the cells are adjacent to each other, compartmentalized with no windows, and the only opening to the cell faces the watchtower in the center such that the prisoner can see the physical watch tower and have no communications with their neighboring cells. So, surveillance is done only from one vantage point and still, the entire building of cells can be seen very clearly from there. The interesting feature to this building is that the inspector,

This is a similar structure to the Prison Panopticon, except that the shape of the building is supposed to be dodecagonal. Unlike the prison system, the Pauper Panopticon does not imprison subjects in cells. It targets the “Pauper Population” and the facility is open to people of all ages and background where subjects enter/leave the building voluntarily. There are certain restrictions put in place to maintain order in the building. Some restrictions are: The “earn-first principle” requires subjects who are fed in the facility to complete their share of work before they can leave; children are also not allowed to leave the facility once they are inducted and taken care of in the Pauper Panopticon until they reach a certain age. Subjects live in a transparent manner and the panoptic structure retains the severe lack of privacy like convicts in the Prison Panopticon. Most subjects are only entitled to privacy if there are special reasons like marital sex, or private consultations with the older paupers (Schofield, 2009). These older paupers are the “Guardian Elders”. In this panoptic structure, the “Guardian Elders” take over the role as “watchers” where they are also assumed to be righteous and uncorrupted, like the inspectors in a prison Panopticon. Surveillance is done by the “Guardian Elders” by enforcing rules for daily living (feeding) and careful

While the essence of the Constitutional Panopticon is still the same as with the Prison Panopticon, it has a certain modification to panoptic features. The special aspect of this panoptic structure is that the roles of the “watcher” and “watched” are reversed. Governors, who are used to surveying people, is now the subject of scrutiny by the mass public, who is usually the one being surveyed. This structure is in the form of a parliamentary building. It targets the government officials and serves to impede misrule amidst authority. Noticeably, it has the same issue as the Chrestomathic Panopticon – constant visibility on subjects is not possible unless the subject is physically present in the building. So, governors are only observed by the masses when fulfilling public duties and they could choose to retreat into their privacy when they are tired of being watched. The way the subject of scrutiny is being watched has changed from the system in Prison Panopticon. Surveillance is no longer about feeding the “watcher” information from the subject of scrutiny; it has now extended this power to the public and is known as transparency (Schofield, 2009). As such, the media plays a key role in disseminating information from the public about the governor and his/her government, then back to the public