The Burns Archive
In this eerie photograph of a Cuban prison, inmate after inmate stands silhouetted in a semicircle of stacked cells. They are posed there, backlit, perhaps to demonstrate the buildings utilitarian design. First conceived by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, the so-called panopticon prison design allows a single guard to keep watch on hundreds of confined men while staying in an armored perch, out of the prisoner’s sight. The cells in the prison pictured here do not have doors, though presumably armed guards would have been a deterrent against any escape attempt. Many prisons, including Alcatraz, were designed to remove a convict’s privacy in favor of control, but full incorporations of Bentham’s idea are a rarer find.