Alcatraz: The Women's Jail

Prisons around the world maintain vast amounts of information regarding their cultures, punishment styles, structural feats, religion base, and location. There are prisons located in the center of cities, on islands, in secluded areas, and in the public view. Work on these types of analyzations stem from famous sociologists, phycologists, and philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Tony Bennett, Emile Durkheim, David Garland, and Cesare Beccaria. All of these profound scholars has contributed some of the most amazing research into the Prison System, theories of crime and punishment, institutional reform, and theoretical penology. The Prison Museums that will be analyzed in this article will include Alcatraz (San Francisco), The Women’s Jail (Joburg,

This created a huge deterrent to commit crime because people didn’t want to betray God and go to hell. To Christians, God is said to be watching over us to protect us from evil. This correlates directly to the theme of panopticism studied by Bentham and Foucault. “In the 1970’s, the panopticon (from the Greek, meaning ‘everything’ and ‘a place of sight’) was proposed as a solution to the English correctional crisis during which horrific prison conditions and hulks became major concerns for reformers” (Welch 2011 pg.43). The panopticon was a tower in the center of a prison that had the ability to see every single prisoner in every single cell whenever they wanted to. Panopticism was used as a surveillance tool where religion and deterrence are built into the design hence the theory of The Omniscient Deity. Panopticism, developed by Michel Foucault, links every prison mentioned above together in different ways that work for each individual prison museum to help tourists understand the ways in which panopticism is included in their own local

The panopticon according to Foucault, is a guard tower in the center of the prison that has the ability to oversee all the prisoners at once conveying constant surveillance. For instance, “Due to the central location of the guard tower, inmates could not always be sure whether or not they indeed were the objects of observation. Therefore Foucault notes that the target of social control is not so much the inmate’s body, but the inmates mind, in that constant surveillance creates a permanent presence in the mind (similar to the effects of surveillance cameras today)” (Welch 2011 pg. 44). In Society today, it is evident that crime is at an all-time low due to the increase in surveillance around the globe. This practice of evolving the panopticon to other tactics has proven to be an effective deterrent. Being a criminal today is much harder today than it was in the