Embracing Sin: Hester Prynne And The Panopticon

Abstract

It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform the prisoner…to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another…of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power. (Foucault on Panopticism, Discipline and Punish, 1995)