The Prison Building as Spectacle

One of the basic premises that Michel Foucault makes concerning the transition of power, is the decline of the spectacle of the scaffold and the rise of a meticulous order of justice and punishment. Although the visibility of the prisoner is quite reduced, there are still great symbols of justice, which persist in great visibility and act as constraining forces on human action. One of the most noticeable aspects of this is the physical institution of the prison.
My father worked for over thirty years in a building that was approximately a mile from the large penitentiary in Rahway, New Jersey. This prison is located in a large field surrounded by barbed wire fences, but it is far from isolated from the surrounding social space. There is a DMV less than a quarter mile from the prison, as well as numerous consumer businesses in the immediate area. Although the building acts to obscure the prisoners from the gaze of the general public, the building itself takes on the symbolic role as an indicator of the practice of justice.
This shift from an overt expression of justice to a covert symbol of justice gives greater range to the thought of the external observer, and potentially the capacity for violent images of justice. As filmmakers have observed for many years, overt televised violence tends to pale in comparison to the illusion of violence. The human mind is able to imagine violence that filmmakers can never express. Similarly, I wonder whether the mental concept of prison is even more spectacular than the town battle between the sovereign and the condemned.