Bentham’s Symbolic Ideas for Prison Facades

face of a prisoner

Bentham’s provocative proposals for prison symbols indicate that he wrote The Rationale of Punishment, Book II, Chapter 7, about the year 1778. In his View of the Hard-Labour Bill, written in March, 1778, Bentham included some unusual ideas for decorating the façade of the proposed Houses of Hard-Labour:

Over the door there might likewise be a bas-relief, or a painting, exhibiting a wolf and a fox yoked together to a heavy cart, and a driver whipping them: the wolf as an emblem of violence and mischief; the fox of knavery. In the back ground might be a troop of wolves ravaging a flock of sheep, and a fox watching a hen-roost. …

Should it be thought an improvement, a monkey, as being more peculiarly the emblem of wanton mischief, might be added to the above train.^

Chapter 7 repeats this idea, with less elaboration and a defensiveness which suggests that Bentham’s proposal had become a subject of ridicule:

On the outside of the two last kinds of prisons {the “Penitentiary House” and the “Black Prison”} may be represented various figures, emblematical of the supposed dispositions of the persons confined in them. A monkey, a fox, and a tiger, representing mischief, cunning, and rapacity, the sources of all crimes, would certainly form more appropriate decorations for a prison than the two statues of melancholy and raving madness, formerly standing before Bedlam….I am fully aware, that to the man of wit, these emblematical figures may serve as matter for ridicule: in poetry they are admirable, in reality despicable. Fortunately, however, they are more assailable by ridicule than by reason.^

Marked at the end of the last sentence is a footnote:

Of the importance of symbols, and the uses that have been made of them, by the Catholic clergy, after the example of ancient Rome, see Emile, tom. iv.

Bentham probably wrote this text as a counter-thrust to the response to his March, 1778, publication. Its reference to “Penitentiary House” is consistent with the shift from the House of Hard-Labour to Penitentiary House in the bill that became the Penitentiary Act of 1779.

Bentham’s symbolic prison facade might be more directly traced to the seventeenth-century gate of Amsterdam’s famous rasphouse (workhouse). That institution had facade similar to what Bentham proposed:

in 1624 there was a relief representing a chariot loaded with Brazil redwood driven by a man with a whip and drawn by four lions, a wild swine, and a wolf. The animals symbolized ‘cruel dissoluteness,” gluttony, and ‘useless devouring.’ … The entrance was made more monumental a few decades later. It came to consist of two gates, one beind the other, the second adorned with stone lions and a statue of two rasping inmates. Later still, a statue of a female castigatio with two chained prisoners was constructed above the first gate.^

The rasphouse attracted many spectators from abroad. Accounts of its appearance undoubtedly circulated widely.

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