In Bentham's Prison, Janet Semple suggests that Jeremy Bentham found the inspiration for the Panopticon in a description of Pope Clement XI's St. Michele reformatory, built in Rome in 1703, which Bentham may have seen in Howard's State of the Prisons in England and Wales. She fails to note, however, that it was Samuel Bentham, not Jeremy, who devised the structure of the Inspection House. Semple's mistake is typical of an historiographical approach which takes the Panopticon completely out of context, treating it as the idealized and unrealized invention of Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon devised by Samuel Bentham was deeply embedded in a specific context. That context was absolutist Russia. (..) In contrast to the fate of the Panopticon in England, where lack of resources and political ill–will denied Jeremy the opportunity of seeing his penitentiary built, it was only chance that stopped Samuel building his Inspection House, when he was forced to leave Krichev for the war with the Turks: but the land, labour and finance needed for the project were all available in abundance.
— Simon Werret, Potemkin and the Panopticon: Samuel Bentham and the Architecture of Absolutism in Eighteenth Century Russia
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