While much of criminology is about understanding why people commit crime, the lecture "Crime and Punishment in the USA" focused on society's responses to crime. We saw different approaches of reaction to crimes, empirical statistics and ideas of punishment, such as Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (as seen on the left). The idea behind it is, that a single watchmen is capable of observing the whole inmates of an institution, without the inmates being able to tell wether or not they are being watched. In my opinion this type of institutional building designed by Bentham is one of the most interesting things we could hear in that lecture. Because, although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly. 

Fun Fact: the name is a reference to Panoptes from Greek mythology. He was a giant with a hundred eyes and thus was known to be a very effective watchman. 

This lecture was a great introduction to the ways social scientists measure, think about, and theorize punishment. Seeing the differences between the American model of criminal punishment and that one of Germany makes the whole lecture even more valuable.