This dissertation explores the role played by the modern prison, or so-called Panopticon Penitentiary, within Bogota s elite project of constructing a modern Nation State during the 19th century which should respond efficiently to the dominant values of the time as well as to the particular needs of its class. Therefore, the aims of this research are, firstly, to bring new tools to understand the modern prison as part of the strategies and dispositifs adopted by Colombia s capital elite in order to create a modern Establishment as well as a modern national community. Secondly, to shed light on those grey areas of Bogota s society the prison and the criminal- whose historical development seems to reveal a less traumatic and politics-oriented age, as traditionalist historiography has sustained so far. Overall, a research on such a subject seeks to contribute to the unfinished debate on Colombia s modern Nation State making, which has seen in the last decade a significant increase in new approaches. Finally, this work sustains that the fulfillment of the Panopticon Scheme (or its ideal) was the result of two phenomena. On the one hand, the progressive gentrification of Bogota s elite. On the other hand, the new status of relationships that the elite defined to marginalized groups, in particular to those seen as dangerous for its ideal of order and modernization , such as the criminal. Hence, the history of the Panopticon as an ideal of State and Nation modernization along with its development as a public institution is analyzed under those two particular phenomena which highly determined the history of Bogota s modern punitive institution as well as the particular shape of its society in the early modern times.