Stateville Correctional Center is a maximum security state prison

Prison

A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...

 for men in Crest Hill, Illinois

Crest Hill, Illinois

Crest Hill is a city in Will County, Illinois, United States. The population was 13,329 at the 2000 census and the 2010 census population estimate was 20,867.-Geography:Crest Hill is located at...

, USA

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

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Opened in 1925, Stateville was built to accommodate 1,506 inmates. Parts of the prison were designed according to the panopticon

Panopticon

The Panopticon is a type of building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe all inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched...

 concept proposed by the British philosopher and prison reformer, Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...

. Stateville's "F-House" cellhouse, commonly known as a "roundhouse," has a panopticon layout which features an armed tower in the center of an open area surrounded by several tiers of cells.