the Panopticon

We went to Haarlem on Friday, which is a more like a large town than a city. You get there quickly by train. It is only about 10 miles west of Amsterdam and is totally different; wider streets, more cars, fewer bicycles. We visited a site that is an element in one of Leslie's school projects, had lunch at the Jopen brewery (future post), and went to one of the few remaining and functioning windmills in Holland (yet another post). While up in the windmill on a tour, we noticed a large domed building in the distance. Th tour guide said it was the former jail and was now being used to temporarily house Syrian refugees. Dredging up some memory of architectural history, I realized it was a panopticon, a relic of 18th and 19th century ideas about prisons and social control. Right there in Haarlem!

The Panopticon was a type of institutional building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the [circular] design is to allow all inmates of an institution to be observed by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. The inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behavior constantly.

The term has become something of a metaphor for the modern surveillance state although whereas prisoners in the panopticon knew they were being watched, we can only assume that maybe we are being watched.

There are only a handful of panopticon prisons in the world and 3 of them were built in the Netherlands. The Haarlem prison was built in 1910, but no longer functions as a prison. There is some irony that the aforementioned Syrian refugees are currently housed here.