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, 20 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: