Editor's note: Jeremy Bentham wrote the letters which constitute the Panopticon Papers while in Russia in 1787. The penitentiary model described in these letters provided the basis of a proposal for which he vigorously lobbied in England. He committed significant amounts of his own effort and money to the panopticon plan, although ultimately without success in his native country. The material reproduced below comes from letters 9, 10, and 12, and addresses a number of issues that are at the heart of the modern privatization debate. Enoch Wines was appointed secretary of the New York Prison Associa tion in 1862. Although initially not as experienced as many of his co-workers in the Association, he soon became an important figure in American penal reform. His national prison tour with Theodore Dwight in the 1860s produced the most important correctional assessment since John Howard's E uropean survey in the 1770s. The observations included in this article thus derived from his wide-ranging examination of the nation's prison system.

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Give me leave to add the following particulars (by way of additional note to what is said in the History and Antiquities of the Church of Ely, page 85,) concerning the removal of some Bones, in the pious conservation of which our ancestors were pleased to interest themselves, from a grateful remembrance of that beneficence which the persons there mentioned had exercised towards the Religious of this place. These bones had for a long time been immured within the north wall of the late choir. When it became necessary, on account of removing the choir to the east end of the church, to take down that wall, I thought proper to attend; and also gave notice of it to several gentlemen, who were desirous of beng present when the wall was demolished. There were the traces of their several effigies on the wall, and over each of them an inscription of their names. Whether their relicks were still to be found was uncertain; but I apprised those who attended on that occasion, May 18, 1769, that, if my surmises were well founded, no head would be found in the cell which contained the bones of Brithnoth, duke of Northumberland.

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