ABSTRACT
The major effect of the Panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. The Panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's plan for a prison in which large numbers of convicts could be kept under surveillance by very few guards. By intrinsic loss of freedom, the author points to ways in which denial of privacy limits people's freedom directly, independently of the ways in which it makes them susceptible to social pressure or penalties. Privacy conveys to the individual his self-ownership precisely by the knowledge that the individual gains of his ability and his authority to withdraw himself from the scrutiny of others. Those who lose this ability and authority are thereby told that they don't belong to them-selves; they are specimens belonging to those who would investigate them.
