Editor's
note:
Jeremy Bentham wrote the letters which constitute the
Panopticon Papers while in Russia in 1787. The penitentiary model
described in these letters provided the basis of a proposal for which he
vigorously lobbied in England. He committed significant amounts of his own
effort and money to the panopticon plan, although ultimately without success
in his native country. The material reproduced below comes from letters 9,
10, and 12, and addresses a number of issues that are at the heart of the
modern privatization debate.
Enoch Wines was appointed secretary of the New York Prison Associa
tion in 1862. Although initially not as experienced as many of his co-workers
in the Association, he soon became an important figure in American penal
reform. His national prison tour with Theodore Dwight in the 1860s
produced the most important correctional assessment since John Howard's
E uropean survey in the 1770s. The observations included in this article thus
derived from his wide-ranging examination of the nation's prison system.
