For many years the door of the Old Provost Prison on Lucas Avenue has been closed. Now visitors can once more enter the strange semi-circular courtyard with its radiating walls and short tower, and experience the unique features of 18th century prison design.
For many years the door of the Old Provost Prison on Lucas Avenue has been closed. Now visitors can once more enter the strange semi-circular courtyard with its radiating walls and short tower, and experience the unique features of 18th century prison design.
The Old Provost was built as part of the Grahamstown military camp by Sir Benjamin D’Urban, then governor of the Cape Colony and military Commander-in-Chief.
In 1838 he instructed the Royal Engineers to build a prison: the eight cells suggest that they didn’t expect a lot of trouble!
The name comes from its association with the Provost Marshall, the officer responsible for order in the camp. It is unlikely that there were any executions in the Provost.
Imagine instead a few drunk-and-disorderlies sobering up, the occasional deserter, exhausted after being chased through the Eastern Cape bush, and someone caught stealing a fellow soldier’s boots.
They were put in the cells, each with its own high-walled exercise strip, and the guards in the tower were able to check on them every time they looked out of the window slits.
This feature of the building, the central tower with its little observation windows, shows that it was built on the most advanced principals of prison construction of its day.
Jeremy Bentham*, a lawyer, prison reformer and Utilitarian philosopher, introduced the design in 1791.
Although he referred to it as “a mill for grinding rogues honest,” he wanted to replace the flogging, starving, chains and pillories that were common up to that time.
The principle of the prison is that inmates are always visible to the guards from the second storey viewing room of the tower, but the prisoners never know when they are being watched.
He called the design the “panopticon” or all-seeing space, which he described as “a new mode of obtaining power over the mind.”
He saw it as a humane and practical way of controlling behaviour and recommended the design also for schools, mental institutions, daycare centres and hospitals!
One can ask whether modern health suites with their glassed cores are punishment or not. It was, however, as a prison that the panopticon spread through the United Kingdom, America and Australia, where much larger examples can still be seen.
Nearly two centuries later, the French philosopher Michel Foucault was inspired by the panopticon prison design to develop an aspect of his theory of social control.
In Discipline and Punish, published in 1979, he explores the mechanisms by which the power given to the guards to observe the inmates, and the lack of privacy of the prisoners, operates as a force of control and restraint.
He saw parallels in the design of modern factories and banks with glassed managers’ rooms, and in schools where teachers’ desks are placed so that they can see the whole space.
When you visit the Old Provost today, however, nobody will be watching you with the intent of controlling anything except your caffeine levels.
The Provost Cafe opened there on 8 April 2013, specialising in Italian coffee with snacks baked on site.
You can now relax between prison walls or escape to the Botanical Gardens with a take-away as you wish.
*A macabre detail is that Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton, dressed in his clothes, was kept at University College, London, and brought to meetings where he was minuted as present but without voting rights.
