Debating Prison Surveillance
Source/Author: Natalie Updike, Upper School English Teacher
October 26, 2022
In Ms. Updike's English 12 Honors: Prison Narratives course, seniors learned about Panopticonism - a disciplinary theory that the fear of constant surveillance can bring order and discipline.
During Unit 1: Prison History, students studied the shift from corporal punishment to the early incarceration models of the Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems. With this knowledge and after reading excerpts from French philosopher Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison," students drew visual depictions of Jeremy Bentham's model of surveillance or the Panopticon. They also located systems and places outside of the Prison Industrial Complex where Panopticonism is at work, all in preparation for an in-class debate.
During the debate, students moved among gradients within a Likert scale from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" over the following statements:
1) Panopticonism is an essential part of any society
2) The benefits of surveillance outweigh the disadvantages
3) Panopticonism affects some groups of people more than others.
All of this work helped provide prerequisite grounding for our study of Dwayne Betts' memoir, "A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison."
During Unit 1: Prison History, students studied the shift from corporal punishment to the early incarceration models of the Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems. With this knowledge and after reading excerpts from French philosopher Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison," students drew visual depictions of Jeremy Bentham's model of surveillance or the Panopticon. They also located systems and places outside of the Prison Industrial Complex where Panopticonism is at work, all in preparation for an in-class debate.
During the debate, students moved among gradients within a Likert scale from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" over the following statements:
1) Panopticonism is an essential part of any society
2) The benefits of surveillance outweigh the disadvantages
3) Panopticonism affects some groups of people more than others.
All of this work helped provide prerequisite grounding for our study of Dwayne Betts' memoir, "A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison."
