Politics and Culture in eighteenth- century Britain Lecture 11: 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 ‘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?’