A study of prisoners: from Benthams Panopticon to modern electronic surveillance. Problems and perspectives

Abstract

Although in the last decades of the twentieth century modern and evolutionary technology has allowed the introduction of new forms of prisoner surveillance, both in intra-mural and extra-mural terms, the study conducted, starting from the brilliant intuition of Jeremy Benthams Panopticon and its functional prison engineering, The study, starting from the brilliant intuition of the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham and its functional prison engineering, has investigated, in a comparative perspective, both the first methodologies of control of prisoners and the modern and technological processes of surveillance that appear, however, far from the general and disciplinary purposes of the past, fulfilling, today, only tasks of mere control of the person in a well-defined space.