The Panopticon may be one of the true oddities of architectural history, but it was more than a mere curio. The model prison was designed by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the British Utilitarian philosopher who unsuccessfully promoted his plan for twenty years, spending a small fortune in the process (Evans 1982:195–197). Bentham was primarily concerned with the nature of government and the justice of punishment, and, for that reason, a pioneer of prison reform, though a somewhat quirky one. The hidden labyrinths of eighteenth-century prisons led to unobserved abuses, and Bentham's solution was the Panopticon (Figure 5.1) – a circular, glassroofed structure, with cells along the outer ring all facing onto a central rotunda where a single guard could keep every prisoner under constant surveillance (Johnston 1973: 19–21). Bentham lavished a creator's prose on the project: “The building circular – A cage, glazed … The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference, the inspectors concealed … from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence … One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell” (cited in Evans 1982: 195). Bentham's Panopticon was an architectural plan designed explicitly as a means of social control “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1977: 201).