The English utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham, was a late eighteenth-century social philosopher interested in penitentiaries. With the help of his brother Samuel, he designed the "Panopticon" as a model for a penitentiary. It was a circular building with tiers of cells around a concealed inspection gallery, shown "F" on the illustration. This arrangement allowed for constant surveillance of prisoners who, according to Bentham's plan, were never to leave their cells. They were to be watched while working, eating and sleeping. The goal of this strict discipline and rigid confinement was to instil in inmates habits of industry that would continue after their release. This drawing appears in J. Bowring, ed., Jeremy Bentham: Works, volume 7.
For prison idealists such as John Howard and Jeremy Bentham, architecture assumed a great deal of importance, for the correct design, in theory at least, provided a means of implementing control without the application of brute force. The belief that architectural design could influence behaviour in a positive manner was adopted elsewhere. A group of American reformers, the Boston Prison Discipline Society, coined the term "moral architecture." Although it was never fully practised in Canada, Bentham's method of treating prisoners, known as "the separate system," was attempted in both the United States and England. During the nineteenth century it attracted the attention of Canadian penal experts.
