Michel Foucault's Panopticism And Migrant Detention

CONCLUSION
As we see by analyzing Michel Foucault’s chapter, Panopticism, and Dominique Moran’s book, Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention, prison architecture has evolved from confining those who were considered abnormal because they violated the law to mentally impacting prisoners by making them paranoid, scared, and frustrated. Initially, prisons were visible to the public because they were built in the center of the city to allow society to see what they may have to go through if they acted outside of the law. This served as a deterrent method of teaching society to act within the norm and obey the laws, or else they can be locked up in a cage like the prisoners they saw before them. As the prison population grew, so did the surveillance methods: prison administrations sought to have as few prison guards as possible to surveil as many prisoners possible. This is what the prison administration called effective and strategic surveillance. However, this couldn’t be done in the center of the city because the streets were overcrowding. Therefore, the idea of separate confinement, that was invisible from society, was thought of. The observing apparatus-the panoptic design of prison- as described by Foucault in Panopticism, enables prison administration to observe and monitor the
By becoming disciplined and normalized, as prison thought, prisoners will be able to be self-aware of their actions and thus, able reintegrate back into society, obey the laws, and stay out of the justice system. However, by analyzing parts of the book, Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention, through the lens of visibility and invisibility of prison architecture, we saw that the prison architecture did not produce docile and useful bodies. Rather, it produced bodies that lost their own identity and humanity and became paranoid, terrified and