Philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed the Panopticon, a circular prison design allowing constant surveillance from a central point. Though never fully built as envisioned, it influenced modern prison architecture emphasizing control and reform.

Foucault later analyzed the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish, impacting postmodern literature on power and surveillance. It informed dystopian fiction and poetry critiquing institutional control, relevant to 20th-century gulag and mass incarceration themes in art.