Jeremy Bentham, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The panopticon, or inspection-house, is the most humane prison ever proposed — government by inspection and publicity, in which the watched can never know when they are watched, and in which the keeper himself is exposed to view: the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave. To set liberty against security and lament that more of one is less of the other is to deal in sounds instead of sense.
Liberty, in the libertarian sense, is the bare physical power to act unhindered — which includes the power to assault and to defraud. Security — for person, property, reputation, and condition — is the substantive good; it is made by law, which is coercion, and the coercion is repaid many times in the opportunity it founds. The objection from human dignity rests on theology and has no ontological basis.12
It is this circumstance that renders the influence of this plan > not less beneficial to what is called Liberty than to necessary coercion; not less > powerful as a controul upon subordinate power, than as a curb to delinquency; as > a shield to innocence than as a scourge to guilt.CIRCULAR. To the LORD CHANCELLOR and the JUDGES, pp. 230–231
There are two ways in which liberty may be violated: by physical or bodily coercion, and by moral coercion or demonstration of punishment;—the one applied before the time for exercising the liberty—the other to be applied after it, in the shape of punishment, in the event or its not producing its intended effect in the shape of prohibition.The Works of Jeremy Bentham Vol II, pp. 938–939
Foucault (Discipline and Punish, 1975) made the panopticon the figure of the modern disciplinary state and the genealogy of surveillance; civil-libertarian and rights-based critics extend the charge against utilitarian government. Schofield and the editors of the Collected Works have recovered the panopticon as a reform proposal within Bentham's wider constitutional theory of publicity and accountability.