Pennsylvanian prisons relied on conscience and architecture rather than law

Evidence

In absolute isolation – as at Philadelphia – the rehabilitation of the criminal is expected not of the application of a common law, but of the relation of the individual to his own conscience and to what may enlighten him from within. ‘Alone in his cell, the convict is handed over to himself; in the silence of his passions and of the world that surrounds him, he descends into his conscience, he questions it and feels awakening within him the moral feeling that never entirely perishes in the heart of man’ (Journal des économistes, II, 1842). It is not, therefore, an external respect for the law or fear of punishment alone that will act upon the convict but the workings of the conscience itself. A profound submission, rather than a superficial training; a change of ‘morality’, rather than of attitude. In the Pennsylvanian prison, the only operations of correction were the conscience and the silent architecture that confronted it. At Cherry Hill, ‘the walls are the punishment of the crime; the cell confronts the convict with himself; he is forced to listen to his conscience’. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 366

Categorization

• XREF: The solitary-cell model makes the convict police himself from within — the purest dramatization of the internalized panopticon the reader is mapping onto Oceania.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘the walls are the punishment of the crime’ — architecture alone doing the work of correction without any visible supervisor — is the fullest statement of panoptic power operating anonymously, a central mechanism for the reader’s thesis.