Conversly, the tower is far enough from the cells and has sufficiently small windows that the prisoners cannot see the guards inside of it. The guards can thus see the entirety of any cell at any time, and the prisoners are always vulnerable and visible. This open side has bars over it, but is otherwise entirely exposed to the tower. The building with the prisoners is only one cell thick, and every cell has one open side facing the central tower. The layout (which is depicted below) consists of a central tower for the guards, surrounded by a ring-shaped building of prison cells. The basic principle for the design, which Bentham first completed in 1785, was to monitor the maximum number of prisoners with the fewest possible guards and other security costs. Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher and social theorist in the mid-1700s, invented a social control mechanism that would become a comprehensive symbol for modern authority and discipline in the western world: a prison system called the Panopticon.
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