5HUM2071 : Politics and Culture in eighteenth-century Britain Lecture 10: The Great Incarceration
Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’ (1787) ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind in a quantity hitherto without example.’
William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, plate 8: ‘the Rake in Bedlam’
John Howard, The State of the Prisons (1777)
William Hogarth, The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), plate 4
William Hogarth, Industry and Idleness, plate 11: The Idle 'Prentice Executed at Tyburn,’ 1747
Millbank (1816) and Pentonville (1842) prisons
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (NY, 1979), pp. 201-2 ‘Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable...It is an important mechanism, for it automizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes...’
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (NY, 1979), p. 228 ‘The practice of placing individuals under 'observation' is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. ... Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’