Galway’s Panopticon
Viewing a 19th Century Gaol Through a Modern Prism
Looking at old maps is a fascinating business, especially when you can walk around the streets today and then flip between eras in an online viewer. Above is a purloined screenshot from the Ordnance Survey 6" map, dating from between 1837 and 1842, of the centre of Galway City — specifically, where there is now a large cathedral and where there were formerly the county and town gaols. I’ve spend the past year studying in the nearby university — in fact, a lot of the time in the very building marked ‘Fever Hospital’, now obviously repurposed (as the Irish Centre for Human Rights) — but I’m only now really getting to grips with the surrounding historical geography. At the same time, I’ve been reading quite a bit of Foucault for, or at least tangential to, my studies; and consequently the shape of that gaol immediately signifies one thing to me: Panopticon.
Given the time period, it’s not too surprising; it’s more disconcerting, perhaps, that in the later (1890s) 25" map the whole complex is a blank, despite the greater detail in almost every other area of urban infrastructure. The only outward trace today is the name, Gaol Road, encircling the cathedral (a rather drab stone behemoth, to my eye). As it happens, though, Galway County Council have an excellent digital archive containing original drawings and plans relating to the two Gaols, County and Town, including a helpful precis of the historical information. If you want to see what a prisoners’ treadmill looks like, at least in an architectural drawing, go there. But of more immediate interest to me is the 1820 book by James Hardiman, the namesake of the university library, The history of the town and county of the town of Galway. From the earliest period to the present time, available (since it’s out of copyright) as a free and complete ebook. It contains this description of the County Gaol, in which I’ve highlighted one particular line:
“The prison is two stories in height, it is entirely vaulted, and is built in form of a crescent at an equal distance from the boundary wall, inside of which it is surrounded by a handsome gravel walk, a quarter of a mile in circumference. Here the debtors are occasionally permitted to walk and to amuse themselves. No timber is used in the building, metal, iron and stone having been in every instance substituted. The interior is divided into eight wards, six for criminals, and two for debtors, one of which is used as a hospital. These different rooms are capable of containing 180 prisoners, allowing two to each room. Twelve cells might be added to the wards 4, 5, and 6. They are separated by walls, which form so many radii of a circle, and, terminating in the rear of the governor’s house, bring the whole within the range of his windows, by which means he can at a single glance survey the entire. Out of this area the felons are not permitted to pass, and no intercourse whatever is allowed between the sexes, each being confined to separate wards. No prisoner is ever ironed, the strength and security of the place rendering that inhuman precaution unnecessary; but the greatest attention is paid to their individual cleanliness and comfort. Thus every measure is adopted which either humanity can suggest, or the merciful tendency of our laws allow, to alleviate the sorrows and burden of captivity.”
(The History of Galway, 303)
Hardiman, the humanist, thus meets Foucault, the anti-humanist, who describes the operation of Bentham’s ideal Panopticon as follows: “The arrangement of his room [the prisoner’s, or more generally that of the confinee], opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility.” (Discipline and Punish, 200) The layout of the Galway Gaol is not quite as extreme — the yards and their respective wards are separated, not individual prisoners, who are grouped by sex and status. Specifically, as Hardiman continues, the debtors’ wards, or rather, “apartments”, are “comfortable and convenient” as well as “entirely separate from those of the felons”; on the plans, they occupy the corner of the semi-circle, and presumably less visible from the central point.
According to the Dictionary of Irish Architects, the gaol’s design was based on William Blackburn’s Gloucester County Gaol, which opened in 1791 and which in turn had specifically been designed to “allow the separate system to be employed”; whereas previously all prisoners were held together, with only the sexes separated at night, this novel idea aimed to reduce interaction between different classes of criminal. Or to eliminate it altogether — for Foucault these “English models” added, to the principle of making inmates work, “isolation”, acting on their spiritual nature:
“The cell, that technique of Christian monachism, which had survived only in Catholic countries, becomes in this protestant society the instrument by which one may reconstitute both homo oeconomicus and the religious conscience.”
(Discipline and Punish, 123)
However, “only one penitentiary was built, at Gloucester, and it corresponded only partially to the initial plan: total confinement for the most dangerous criminals; for the others, day work in common and separation at night.” I haven’t yet found any plan of that now-mostly demolished prison, although from the description linked above its main features seemed to be the separation of different wings, with no specific mention of any panopticon-type layout.
Amongst the advocates of this separation approach had been John Howard, a prison reformer with a strong influence on Bentham; this “celebrated philanthropist” visited Galway in 1788, as Hardiman records, viewing both the town and county gaols. In the latter, “the criminals are in two long rooms with dirt floors and no fire-place; the debtors have small rooms above stairs” (quoted in The History of Galway, 302). Within a few years, presentments had been made “for erecting a more spacious prison”; in 1802, around a decade later - and after the Irish Parliament had been abolished following the 1798 rebellion and the subsequent Union with Britain — an Act of Parliament was passed enabling a new prison to be built (which was how government worked in those days).
Land was purchased on Nun’s Island, from the neighbouring Franciscan convent (still there today) for £664.7s.6d, and the new building was constructed between 1808-9 and opened in 1811. In the 1860s, further alterations were made to adapt to a “separate system of confinement”, thus perhaps fulfilling the original intentions of the 18th century reformers. The prison was eventually closed in 1939, and transferred to the Catholic Diocese of Galway for a nominal sum the following year. It was demolished a decade later and construction began on the current Cathedral, which was completed in 1965. (A similarly designed gaol was erected in Sligo in 1823 and functioned until 1959; an aerial photograph shows how the Galway Gaol must have looked like, while photographs from the derelict remains of the interior are also to be found)
Today, references to the Panopticon from Ireland focus on the still-extant Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, now a museum due largely to its role in suppressing nationalist revolts in Ireland. The Victorian-era wing, upon opening in 1864, “was enthusiastically received with its ‘panoptic design’” although its tiered and curved layout only partly merits the description; nevertheless it can still provoke a stimulating response. Based on the layout of Pentonville prison, Kilmainham appears in The Italian Job (not the remake) among other films. Ironically, the ‘all-seeing eye’ has now become the all-photographed viewpoint, with TripAdvisor urging you to share your pictures and touring perspectives.
The Panopticon, in Bentham’s full formulation (with extra-creepy notions of ‘zig-zag openings’ and Venetian blinds so as not to “betray the presence of the guardian”; in other words, permanent yet unverifiable surveillance) was never built, or instead, CCTV arrived and made it unnecessary to build. For although Foucault notes the contrast between the Enlightenment Utopia and the “ruined prisons” which came before, he warns:
“… the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is a the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance, or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific usage.”
(Discipline and Punish, 205)
