First Response, "Panopticism"

I really liked how he opened this essay, comparing a town that has a plage and how you're supposed to show up at YOUR window and no one elses so they can tell if you're sick or not, to prisons and how this town with the plague is just like being in prison.

It goes on to explain the Panopticon. He writes, "that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who execises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers." I like how he compares the prisons and these prisoners to this "machine" panopticon.

The other thing I really like that he wrote is he brings all three together. "On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social “quarantine,” to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of “panopticon."

And last but not least that really got me was at the end of this well written, comparative essay. “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” The reason being is because when I went to high school, (Eagle High School) it didn’t look at all the way it does today – it didn’t have any colors and what other high school do you know of that has a fence SURROUNDING the entire school? When I started going there, before they made any improvements, it kind of creeped me out a bit, because myself and others all said that it looked like a prison.