The Post 911 Panopticon of Political Control

[David Guyatt]

The Panopticon is at its core a surveillance prison where the prisoners (us) are unable to see and therefore number their warders. It is a system built on fear. The Panopticon was designed by Englishman Jeremy Bentham who said of his invention:

a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."[2]

But read on and note the two paragraph's extracted from the below essay that state:

During the Civil War, the Defenses of Washington (1862) - a circumferential ring of fortified installations - successfully safeguarded the vulnerable city. Since 11 September, 'next-generation' technologies are administering sprawl's unrestrained landscapes. Streets, sidewalks and back yards that shape the suburban imagination are being re-imaged in military-grade surveillance and satellite-based GPS. Constructed in real and near-real time, sprawl's unpredictable legacy of subdivisions, culs-de-sac, big-box retailers, parking lots, fast-food franchises and high-tech corridors are being reconceptualized as 'battlespace' 24, the multidimensional battlefield constructed by sensor and reporting technologies that conduct intelligence collection, surveillance and reconnaissance. Reconstituted in GIS scene mapping and mission planning softwares 25 - suburban sanctuaries are captive to command-and-control arsenals which have supplanted the omniscient bird's-eye overview.

New technologies reveal latent infrastructures of political control already embedded in suburban landscapes. They expose consumer-driven sprawl as uniquely manipulable information space (fig. 10). The single-family home is a rich lode of sensitive information about debt, cars, credit cards, banking, taxes, travel, school performance and medical history. Data mining's invasive pattern-recognition algorithms - developed from statistics, artificial intelligence and machine learning - scour massive databases on behalf of the government, seeking 'interesting knowledge' 26. Sprawl's complex information space has become captive to panoptic schemes of 'multiple cartographies of surveillance'

(my italics).

http://www.cartome.org/nss/Natsios-NSS.htm

x
in:
Sensing the 21st Century City: Close-Up and Remote
AD Architectural Design
Vol. 75 No. 6 Nov/Dec 2005
Brian McGrath and Grahame Shane (eds.)
Wiley-Academy (London)
pp 80-85

National Security Sprawl
by Deborah Natsios



Birdstrike

Greater Washington DC's airspace offers strategic overviews of tangled metropolitan landscapes shaped by the exigencies of successive national security paradigms. In the hour before it crashed into the west fa�ade of the Pentagon at 9:38AM on 11 September 2001, hijacked American Airlines flight 77 mapped a provocative trajectory above this complex domain, tracking national security landmarks embedded in one of the nation's fastest-growing urbanised formations 1. Within the hour, the capital region's snarled American-dream sprawl would be transformed into the unprecedented threatscape of the 'homeland'.



The Los Angeles-bound flight had headed west from suburban Dulles International Airport before stealthily doubling back towards the capital city with transponder deactived 2, navigating a final overflight of Northern Virginia's anarchic exurban terrain. Beneath the opportunistic flightpath, national security institutions and defence contractors lay discreetly camouflaged within a congested topography of subdivisions, big-box retailers, cineplexes, regional malls and information technology hubs.

At Dulles' southern perimeter, in Chantilly, Virginia, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) - maker of the country's classified spy satellites - huddled in a once-clandestine $350-million suburban headquarters 3. The NRO shared a paradigmatic suburban enclave with its top contractors - including Aerospace Corporation, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin - the pastoral embellishments of an 'exclusive master-planned business community with state-of-the-art business setting amidst an environment with expansive green spaces, parks, ponds and trails' 4 . Closer to the Pentagon, in Langley, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - developer of CORONA 5, the nation's first photoreconnaissance satellite system - was sequestered in a complex modelled on an academic campus prototype. Surrounded by evocatively seigneurial neighborhoods - Savile Manor, Downcrest and Rokeby Farm - the CIA had taken refuge in suburban standards that codified the spatial and functional isolation of properties. Free-standing structures set back on greenscaped lots invited convenient anonymity rather than interaction.



fig. 1

Guided by a bird's-eye view of autumnal landscapes and glinting Potomac River wending below, hijackers manoeuvred the Boeing 767 towards the pentagonal fortress at the margins of the capital's exemplary geometries. In the last minutes of flight, a catastrophic earthbound spiral from an altitude of 7,000 feet collapsed institutional distinctions that stubbornly segregated aerial from terrestrial intelligence collection - as reconnaissance's privileged eye-in-the-sky was crushed into the earthbound object of its predatory scrutiny. (fig. 1)

Long before Flight 77 tracked Northern Virginia's defence topography, the region was first surveyed by air in 1861 when a Union balloon hovering near Arlington helped orchestrate a successful attack against Confederate troops 6. In intervening years, aerial and satellite technologies imaged the region's unruly growth for civilian applications, informing contentious processes of regional planning, traffic analysis and environmental evaluation. After 11 September, Greater Washington would submit to a new generation of 'persistent surveillance', including the military's experimental use of sensor-equipped blimps for aerial command-and-control 7.

War Sprawl



fig. 2

The Department of Defense bulwark targeted on September 11 had provided the principal gateway for Northern Virginia's defence development on its completion in 1943, attracting dense clusters of contractors to its perimeter in Arlington County. These included the hijacked aircraft's own manufacturer, the Boeing Corporation, which, with contracts totaling $13.3 billion, was the nation's second-ranked vendor in 2001 8 . (fig. 2)



fig. 3

Expansion of Greater Washington's government bureaucracies and technocracies, of regional infrastructures, settlements and population had accelerated with security crises 9 from the Civil War through the two World Wars, the Korean conflict, Cold War, Vietnam and current Middle East campaigns. Defence installations and symbiotic contractors would become a mainstay of the area's economy. By 2004, TRW, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and DynCorp alone employed more than 100,000 workers around the region 10 . Spurred by government-related employment - much of it linked to the national security sector - Greater Washington had by 2001 evolved into a mostly suburban metropolitan formation of 6,000 square miles with a population approaching 6,000,000 11. (fig. 3)



fig. 4

At the height of the Cold War, defence development invaded Fairfax County with the completion of Dulles International Airport (1962), the National Defense Highway System's circumferential Capital Beltway (1964) - its diameter calculated to exceed a thermonuclear detonation centered on the capital - and new CIA headquarters (1962) (fig. 4).Anticipating unprecedented scales of consumerism, another 1960s landmark emerged minutes from the CIA. At the nexus of the emerging car-culture - the confluence of the Beltway and three major highways - the country's first regional mega-mall was established at Tysons Corner. Within a generation, a new urbanised typology would accrete around the mall's core. The edge-city - a building pattern defined as having at least 5 million square feet leasable office space and at least 600,000 square feet leasable retail space - introduced a significant suburban phenomenon: more jobs than bedrooms 12.

Today, Tysons Corner's edge-city jobs include leading defence employers Raytheon, BAE Systems, DynCorp, Bechtel, Northrop Grumman and Science Applications International, who share real-estate with the 'largest mass of retail operations on the East Coast, after Manhattan's' 13. Puchasers of stand-off weapons, early-warning systems and hostile-artillery location systems can also shop at Banana Republic, Brooks Brothers and The Disney Store 14. The convergence of national security, transportation and consumer infrastructures was the defining armature of Northern Virginia's suburban expansion.


fig. 5
fig. 6

Miles from the Capital's triumphalist monuments and circumspect war memorials, artefacts of the national security infrastructure have been normalised within suburban landscapes. Civil War forts were absorbed into the capital's arcadian park system. The W-83 Nike missile launch facility became a neighbourhood landmark in Great Falls, Virginia. A microwave station of the U.S. Army Strategic Communications Command towers over the malls at Tysons Corner 15 (fig. 5, 6). If the District of Columbia was the emblematic centre of defence policy - the suburbs hosted the evolving war industry, a war machine banalized by the very real-estate market forces that were shaping the anonymous complexities of sprawl.


Home Invasion

The 11 September attack inaugurated a new chapter in a regional history that had seen metropolitan growth surge with evolving security paradigms. The landmarks of Pierre Charles L'Enfant's seminal Plan of 1791 - tangible symbols of democracy, national unity and power - were deemed vulnerable. The National Capital Planning Commission, overseer of urban design and preservation, introduced to the monumental core an aestheticised arsenal - hardened street furniture, bollards and plinth walls - to fortify building perimeters 16. Jersey barriers and reinforced planters frame the new blast-proof streetscape. Street and sidewalk closures limited public access to sensitive locations. Roadblocks and checkpoints challenged motorists and pedestrians. 'Flexibility and choice' are diminished in a city whose foundational masterplan promoted transparency, vision and access 17.

With the goal of safeguarding high-value targets of the capital's symbolic core, aggressive protocols were also deployed to manage the chaotic landscapes of the metropolitan periphery. The anarchic civilian geography of outlying suburbs would be subjected to provocative security interventions as sprawl's diffuse spaces were disciplined by the capital city's emerging technologies of political control. Invasive technologies threatened to perforate citizenship's privileged constitutional envelope 18, however, jeopardising legal protections surrounding the coveted emblem of individual rights: the single-family home on its consecrated plot of primal green.



fig. 7

Transgressive enforcement methodologies were exhibited on a cloudy morning in March 2002, when 150 heavily armed federal agents invaded Northern Virginia's fragmented sprawl. Fanning out across scattered settlements west of Washington DC and watershed landscapes south of the Potomac, they conducted raids on a dozen area residences, businesses and non-profit organizations 19 . Targeted sites included single-family homes and office buildings in Fairfax County, most clustered together conspicuously near Dulles Airport in the 'boom town' of Herndon, on the Loudoun County border. (fig. 7)

Acting on an alleged 'criminal conspiracy to provide material support to terrorist organizations by a group of Middle Eastern nationals living in Northern Virginia" 20, the Operation Green Quest task force, comprising US Customs Service, IRS, FBI and Secret Service, disrupted suburban equanimity as agents 'broke doors and locks, brandished guns, and used handcuffs while they ransacked homes and offices' 21.



fig. 8

A subversive community of co-conspirators had allegedly exploited sprawl's unruly dislocations, infiltrating Fairfax County's heterogeneous mix of mandarin power and common democratic culture, tainting the suburban refuge of manicured lawns, asphalt driveways and culs-de-sac that are home to a population of over 1,000,000. (fig. 8)The raids, and those that followed, signaled that Northern Virginia's swathe of Greater Washington DC sprawl - a rapidly evolving region shaped by the competing interests of homeowners, regional planners, developers, highway engineers and environmentalists - was being remapped under the new geography of national security threat (fig. 9). As they tracked allegedly illicit financial practices, federal agents plotted the contours of an improbable new battlefield along snarled transportation corridors and layers of impervious asphalt that had supplanted the region's wildlife habitats and agricultural greenfields.


fig. 9

Threatscape





Unfolding beyond the historic city's boundaries, Greater Washington - home to one of the nation's largest Muslim populations 22 - had been cast as a distinctive locus of 'homeland', the emerging nationalist project that is reclassifying civilian landscapes as threatscape's defensible space.

With shrewd nomenclature, homeland taxonomies idealise national landscapes to enlist public support for a campaign to design a geography of threat. Landscapes nostalgically extolled in 'land of the free, and home of the brave' support uncritical narratives of national origin, unity, continuity and destiny. In their invasive sweeps across Fairfax and Loudoun county sprawl, the authorities were constructing an incipient homeland cartography.

Homeland invokes both moral order and the spatial conditions of suburban settlement. The iconic diagram of home set within the land betrays the culture's predilection for pastoral rather than urban exemplars, privileging green lawns over city sidewalks. With most of Americans residing in suburbs 23, threats against this dominant environment command the public's attention as well as its acquiescence to government interventions.

Information Battlespace

During the Civil War, the Defenses of Washington (1862) - a circumferential ring of fortified installations - successfully safeguarded the vulnerable city. Since 11 September, 'next-generation' technologies are administering sprawl's unrestrained landscapes. Streets, sidewalks and back yards that shape the suburban imagination are being re-imaged in military-grade surveillance and satellite-based GPS. Constructed in real and near-real time, sprawl's unpredictable legacy of subdivisions, culs-de-sac, big-box retailers, parking lots, fast-food franchises and high-tech corridors are being reconceptualized as 'battlespace' 24, the multidimensional battlefield constructed by sensor and reporting technologies that conduct intelligence collection, surveillance and reconnaissance. Reconstituted in GIS scene mapping and mission planning softwares 25 - suburban sanctuaries are captive to command-and-control arsenals which have supplanted the omniscient bird's-eye overview.



fig. 10

New technologies reveal latent infrastructures of political control already embedded in suburban landscapes. They expose consumer-driven sprawl as uniquely manipulable information space (fig. 10). The single-family home is a rich lode of sensitive information about debt, cars, credit cards, banking, taxes, travel, school performance and medical history. Data mining's invasive pattern-recognition algorithms - developed from statistics, artificial intelligence and machine learning - scour massive databases on behalf of the government, seeking 'interesting knowledge' 26. Sprawl's complex information space has become captive to panoptic schemes of 'multiple cartographies of surveillance' 27.

Next-Generation Sprawl





National security expansion continues to shape Greater Washington DC sprawl. Stringent new security regulations adopted after 11 September - including 82-foot building setbacks as a precaution against truck bombs - will require as many as 50,000 Department of Defense personnel currently occupying some 8 million square feet of rented space in 140 Northern Virginia buildings to relocate to secure sites in outer suburbs beyond the Beltway 28. Defence contractors are expected to follow, a migration that could 'exacerbate the region's traffic, destabilize the real estate market and flood already crowded schools' 29 and 'increase suburban sprawl and frustrate "smart growth" efforts in urban areas'. 30

As sprawl landscapes are hardened behind barbwired buffer zones and government transparency reduced by dark tinted windows, the encroachment of the national security domain - often under cloak of secrecy - has consequences for civilian space and civil liberties. Information activists are harnessing new technologies to educate the public and reverse-engineer the panopticon effect. Web-based initiatives such as Cryptome [http://www.cryptome.org], GlobalSecurity [http://www.globalsecurity.org], the National Security Archive [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/], the Federation of American Scientists [http://www.fas.org] and Memory Hole [http://www.thememoryhole.org], as well as online discussion forums, function as national security watchdogs. They offer powerful tools for public education - often in the face of government opposition. Information transparency is empowering the public with critical bird's-eye views of the homeland's contested battlespace.

+++++++++++++++


FOOTNOTES

1 Vera Cohn and Michael Laris, 'Metro Area Population Continues Upward Trend: Loudoun County Among Nation's Fastest Growing According to Census', Washington Post, 15 April 2005, A01; see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/art...Apr14.html.

2 The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 911 Commission Report, Government Printing Office (Washington DC), 2004, pp 2-35; see http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf.

3 Senate Amendment No. 2502: To Withold Funds Allocated for Construction of the Headquarters Buildings of the National Reconnaissance Office,' Congressional Record, 10 August 1994; see http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1994_cr/...od-nro.htm.

4 Cassidy & Pinkard is the area's largest locally owned commercial real estate firm: 'Cassidy & Pinkard Arranges Sale of Corporate Point III in Westfields', http://www.cassidypinkard.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=4365.

5 National Reconnaissance Office, 'Corona', http://www.nro.gov/corona/facts.html.

6 US Centennial of Flight Commission, 'Balloons in the American Civil War',
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/...s/LTA5.htm.

7 Steve Vogel, 'Military Has High Hopes For New Eye in the Sky: Sensor-Equipped Blimps Could Aid Homeland Security', Washington Post, 8 August 2003, B01.

8 Department of Defense Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, '100 Companies Receiving The Largest Dollar Volume Of Prime Contract Awards: Fiscal Year 2001'. http://www.dior.whs.mil/peidhome/procsta...top100.htm.

9 Atlee E. Shidler [ed], Greater Washington in 1980: A State of the Region Report, The Greater Washington Research Center (Washington DC), 1980, pp 6-9.

10 Martin Kady and Mike Sunnucks "'Bandits" Bank on Bush: Federal Contractors Pin Hopes on Defense Boost', Washington Business Journal, 1 June 2001; see http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/st...tory1.html (May 15, 2005).

11 Greater Washington Initiative, "Get Regional Facts",
http://www.greaterwashington.org/regiona.../index.htm.

12 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, Anchor Press, (New York), 1992, pp 6-7.

13 Brent Stringfellow, 'Personal City: Tysons Corner and the Question of Identity' in A. Bingaman, L. Sanders, and R. Zorach [eds], Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, Routledge, (New York), 2002, p 174.

14 'Tysons Corner Center: Mall Directory'
http://www.shoptysons.com/searchstore/index.cfm.

15 'US Army Strategic Communications Command Microwave Station, Tysons Corner, VA (Fort Ritchie Site E)', http://coldwar-c4i.net/Site_E/index.html, May 27, 2001 and 'Warrenton Station B', http://www.fas.org/irp/facility/warrenton_b.htm.

16 National Capital Planning Commission, The National Capital Urban Design and Security Plan, NCPC, (Washington DC), October 2002, pp 6-10.

National Capital Planning Commission, Designing for Security in the Nation's Capital: A Report by the Interagency Task Force of the National Capital Planning Commission, http://www.ncpc.gov/planning_init/securi...ingSec.pdf.

17 Maureen Fan, 'Block by Block, Access Denied: Security Just One Reason D.C. Has Moved Beyond L'Enfant', Washington Post, 22 August 2004, A01; see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/art...Aug21.html.

18 Simson Garfinkel, Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc (Sebastopol, CA), 2000, pp 1-12.

19 'In the Matter of Searches Involving 555 Grove Street, Herndon, Virginia, and Related Locations: [Proposed Redacted] Affidavit in Support of Application for Search Warrant, US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, October 2003, http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/vae/ArchivePre...102003.pdf.

20 Ibid, p 6.

21 Nancy Dunne, 'Attack On Terrorism - US Homefront: US Muslims see their American Dreams Die', Financial Times, 2 May 2002; see http://specials.ft.com/attackonterrorism...EVBZC.html.

22 District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia Advisory Committees to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 'Civil Rights Concerns in the Metropolitan Washington, D.C. Area in the Aftermath of the September 11, 2001, Tragedies: Chapter 2', June 2003, http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/sac/dc0603/ch2.htm.

23 Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth 1820-2000,
Pantheon (New York), 2003, p 3.

24 National Defense University, Stuart Johnson and Martin Libicki (eds.), Dominant Battlespace Knowledge, NDU Press Book (Washington DC), 1995.

25 ESRI, GIS for Homeland Security, ESRI White Paper, November 2001, http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/...ity_wp.pdf.

26 Usama Fayyaad, Gregory Platetsky-Shapiro and Padhraic Smyth, 'From Data Mining to Knowledge Discovery in Databases', American Association of Artificial Intelligence: AI Magazine 17, Fall 1996, pp 37-51.

27 Mark Monmonier, Spying With Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy. University of Chicago Press (Chicago and London) 2002, pp 1-16.

28 Spencer S. Hsu, 'Defense Jobs in N.Va. At Risk: Many Buildings Fall Short of New Security Standards', Washington Post, 10 May 2005, A01; see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...01087.html.

29 David Cho, 'Base Plan Undercuts Sprawl Battle: Region's Leaders Criticize Job Shifts',
Washington Post, 15 May 2005, A01; see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...01190.html.

30 Hsu, op cit, A01.

[David Guyatt]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Panopticon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It has been suggested that Panopticon (Internet culture) be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)
For other uses, see Panopticon (disambiguation).


Panopticon blueprint by Jeremy Bentham, 1791
The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English architect Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience."[1]
Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."[2]
Contents [hide]
1 Conceptual history
2 Panoptic prison design
2.1 Panopticon-inspired prisons
3 Other panoptic structures
3.1 In popular culture
4 Criticism
5 References
6 See also
7 External links
[edit]Conceptual history

"Morals reformed — health preserved — industry invigorated — instruction diffused — public burthens lightened — Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock — the gordian knot of the poor-law not cut, but untied — all by a simple idea in Architecture!"[3]
Bentham derived the idea from the plan of a military school in Paris designed for easy supervision, itself conceived by his brother Samuel who arrived at it as a solution to the complexities involved in the handling of large numbers of men. Bentham supplemented this principle with the idea of contract management; that is, an administration by contract as opposed to trust, where the director would have a pecuniary interest in lowering the average rate of mortality. The Panopticon was intended to be cheaper than the prisons of his time, as it required fewer staff; "Allow me to construct a prison on this model," Bentham requested to a Committee for the Reform of Criminal Law, "I will be the gaoler. You will see ... that the gaoler will have no salary — will cost nothing to the nation." As the watchmen cannot be seen, they need not be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched. According to Bentham's design, the prisoners would also be used as menial labour walking on wheels to spin looms or run a water wheel. This would decrease the cost of the prison and give a possible source of income.[4]
Moving to India, Bentham devoted a large part of his time and almost his whole fortune to promote the construction of a prison based on his scheme. After many years and innumerable political and financial difficulties, he eventually obtained a favourable sanction from Parliament for the purchase of a place to erect the prison, and in 1811 after Prime Minister Spencer Perceval (1809-1812)[5] approved the purchase of the land, the project was finally started. In 1813, he was awarded a sum of £23,000 the building project to begin the first of a series of prisons dotting the subcontinent. The first and largest of the panopticons was finished in 1817. Just outside New Dehli, this panopticon is still in use today.
While the design did not come to fruition during Bentham's time, it has been seen as an important development. For instance, the design was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and its pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. Foucault proposes that not only prisons but all hierarchical structures like the army, the school, the hospital and the factory have evolved through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon. The notoriety of the design today (although not its lasting influence in architectural realities) stems from Foucault's famous analysis of it.
[edit]Panoptic prison design



Prison Presidio Modelo, December 2005



Prison Presidio Modelo, Inside one of the buildings, December 2005
The architecture
incorporates a tower central to a circular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of the building to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of the cells are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the tower who remains unseen. Toward this end, Bentham envisioned not only venetian blinds on the tower observation ports but also maze-like connections among tower rooms to avoid glints of light or noise that might betray the presence of an observer
—Ben and Marthalee Barton [6]
The Panopticon is widely, but erroneously, believed to have influenced the design of Pentonville Prison in North London, Armagh Gaol in Northern Ireland, and Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. These, however, were Victorian examples of the Separate system, which was more about prisoner isolation than prisoner surveillance; in fact, the separate system makes surveillance quite difficult. No true panopticons were built in Britain during Bentham's lifetime, and very few anywhere in the British Empire.
Many modern prisons built today are built in a "podular" design influenced by the Panopticon design, in intent and basic organization if not in exact form. As compared to traditional "cellblock" designs, in which rectangular buildings contain tiers of cells one atop the other in front of a walkway along which correctional officers patrol, modern prisons are often constructed with triangular or trapezoidal-shaped buildings known as "pods" or "modules". In these designs, cells are laid out in three or fewer tiers arrayed around an elevated central control station which affords a single correctional officer full view of all cells within either a 270° or 180° field of view (180° is usually considered a closer level of supervision). Control of cell doors, CCTV monitors, and communications are all conducted from the control station. The correctional officer, depending on the level of security, may be armed with nonlethal and lethal weapons to cover the pod as well. Increasingly, meals, laundry, commissary items and other goods and services are dispatched directly to the pods or individual cells. These design points, whatever their deliberate or incidental psychological and social effects, serve to maximize the number of prisoners that can be controlled and monitored by one individual, reducing staffing; as well as restricting prisoner movement as tightly as possible.

[edit]Panopticon-inspired prisons
Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Carabanchel Prison — Madrid, Spain
Caseros Prison — Buenos Aires, Argentina
Chi Hoa — Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Huron Historic Gaol — Goderich, Ontario, Canada
Kilmainham Gaol — Dublin, Ireland
Koepelgevangenis (Arnhem) — Arnhem, The Netherlands
Koepelgevangenis (Breda) — Breda, The Netherlands
Koepelgevangenis (Haarlem) — Haarlem, The Netherlands
Millbank Prison — London, United Kingdom
Modelo Prison — Barcelona, Spain
Mount Eden Prisons — Auckland, New Zealand
Old Provost — Grahamstown, South Africa
Panóptico — Bogotá Prison (today the National Museum of Colombia)
Pelican Bay State Prison — Del Norte County, California, USA.
Port Arthur, Tasmania Prison Colony — Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia
Presidio Modelo — Isla de la Juventud‎, Cuba
Round House — Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia
Stateville Correctional Center — Crest Hill, Illinois, USA.
Twin Towers Correctional Facility — Los Angeles, California, USA
Insein Prison — Insein, Burma
[edit]Other panoptic structures

The Panopticon has been suggested as an "open" hospital architecture: "Hospitals required knowledge of contacts, contagions, proximity and crowding... at the same time to divide space and keep it open, assuring a surveillance which is both global and individualising", 1977 interview (preface to French edition of Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon").[citation needed]
The Worcester State Hospital, constructed in the late 19th century, extensively employed panoptic structures to allow more efficient observation of the inmates. It was considered a model facility at the time.
The only industrial building ever to be built on the Panopticon principle was the Round Mill in Belper, Derbyshire, England. Constructed in 1811 it fell into disuse by the beginning of the twentieth century and was demolished in 1959. [7]
Contemporary social critics often assert that technology has allowed for the deployment of panoptic structures invisibly throughout society. Surveillance by closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in public spaces is an example of a technology that brings the gaze of a superior into the daily lives of the populace. Further, Middlesbrough, a town in the North of England, has put loudspeakers to the CCTV cameras. They can transmit the voice of a camera supervisor.[8][9]
[edit]In popular culture
Closed-circuit television is similar to the methods used in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four by the thought police to control the citizenry. At any moment, a person may or may not be being observed via a telescreen, though whether one is being watched at any given moment is unknown to that person.
The popular film Gilda (1946) features a panopticon-style headquarters in the casino of Nazist crimelord Ballin Mundson (George Macready). This menacing office and control base allows Mundson to oversee his gambling empire, and also provides Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) with a means to keep a check on the activities of the film's eponymous femme fatale (Rita Hayworth).
In the British TV science fiction series Doctor Who, the main room of the Capitol on Gallifrey (the Time Lords' home planet) was called the Panopticon, although it apparently did not have a panoptic design. (It may have been called that because events there were televised to the whole planet.)
The 1993 science fiction film Fortress features a heavily panoptic multi-level structure, albeit wholly underground. Most of the control over the structure and the inmates is given to the prison's central computer in similar vein to above literature, with ultimate leverage still exercized by the half-cyborg prison director.
In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the Vicario brothers spend three years in the "panopticon of Riohacha" awaiting trial for the murder of Santiago Nasar.
The 2004 sci-fi adventure The Chronicles of Riddick employs a similar underground structure, which is set deep within the recesses of a planetoid enduring extreme ground temperatures day and night.
The 1998 video game Sanitarium features a mental asylum designed as Panopticon.
In the 2004 video game Silent Hill 4: The Room, there is a prison that is seemingly based on the Panopticon design.
The Asylum level of the game XIII contains a cell block that is organized in this manner.
Post-metal band Isis's 2004 album Panopticon takes both its title and its central lyrical theme from the Panopticon design.
In the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas there is a desolate area of countryside named 'The Panopticon'.
In the television show LOST much of how the Others watched Jack Shepherd, James "Sawyer" Ford, and Kate Austen was very similar to the Panopticon. The character John Locke even takes the name of Jeremy Bentham in Season 4.
John Twelve Hawks writes about panopticon as a model for society in his book The Traveler
In her 2008 young adult novel The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart has the protagonist talk about reading an excerpt from Michel Foucault's book Discipline and Punish in which he "uses the idea of the panopticon as a metaphor for Western society and its emphasis on normalization and observation" (Lockhart 2008, p. 54). She goes on to bring up the panopticon again throughout the course of the book.
In the 2000 video game Deus Ex 'panopticon' is the password for a computer terminal that allows access to the fictional omniscient, media controlling AI Helios
[edit]Criticism

The growth of panoptic monitoring technologies has provoked backlashes by privacy advocates. However, some observers argue that these technologies don't always favor the hierarchical structure outlined by Orwell, Bentham, and Foucault, but can also enable individuals, through inverse surveillance or sousveillance, to appropriate technological tools for individual or public purposes. Still others predict a balanced state of a universal "participatory panopticon" in which there is an equiveillance, or equilibrium of monitoring and control structures between parties.
[edit]References

^ Lang, Silke Berit. "The Impact of Video Systems on Architecture", dissertion, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 2004.
^ Bentham, Jeremy. Panopticon (Preface). In Miran Bozovic (ed.), The Panopticon Writings, London: Verso, 1995, 29-95.
^ Jeremy Bentham. Panopticon. In Miran Bozovic (ed.), The Panopticon Writings, London: Verso, 1995, 29-95.
^ In Miran Bozovic (ed.), The Panopticon Writings, London: Verso, 1995, 29-95.
^ 10 Downing Street — Prime Ministers in History
^ Barton, Ben F., and Marthalee S. Barton. "Modes of Power in Technical and Professional Visuals." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 7.1, 1993, 138-62.
^ Farmer, Adrian, Belper and Milford, Tempus Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2004, 119.
^ Cameras Help Stop Crime The Hoya, September 22, 2006
^ 2006, But Has 1984 Finally Arrived? Indymedia UK, 19 September 2006
[edit]See also

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
Big Brother, a character from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
Big Brother, the popular reality television series
London's "ring of steel"
Governmentality, and the Foucaultian idea of Biopower
Information Awareness Office
Mass surveillance
Omniscience
Right to privacy
Totalitarianism
The Transparent Society by David Brin also Kiln People
The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks
video surveillance
Panopticon (album) by Isis (band)
Panopticon (Internet culture)
Total institution
[edit]External links

Panopticon — by Jeremy Bentham (online version)
Special Issue on the Panopticon — Surveillance and Society
Scare tactics: embedded reporting and the Panopticon effect
Control and Surveillance from Computers In Society - on-line Course
[1]John Bowring, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843). This is the volume of that contains Bentham's writings on the Panopticon.

[Ed Jewett]

The panopticon and related issues, functions and matters are described in "Welcome to the Machine:Science, Surveillance and the Culture of Control", written by Derrick Jensen and George Draffan and published by Chelsea Green in 2004.

http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/it...e_machine/

More description and reviews here:
http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Machine-Sc...1931498520

:bath: