THE NATURAL-BORN CRIMINAL
Cesare Lombroso’s theory of l’umo delinquente—the criminal man—influenced the entire history of criminal identification and criminology. Lombroso, an Italian phy sician in the late-1800s, espoused the idea that criminals “are evolutionary throw backs in our midst…[and] these people are innately driven to act as a normal ape or savage would, but such behavior is considered criminal in our civilized society”. He maintained that criminals could be identified because of the unattractive characteristics they had, their external features reflecting their internal aberrations. While normal “civilized” people may occasionally commit crimes, natural-born criminals could not escape their mark. Lombroso’s comparison of criminals to apes made those of the lower classes and “foreigners” most similar to criminals: The “nature” of criminals was reflected in the structure of Lombroso’s society. His list of criminal “traits” sounds laughable to us today: Criminals were said to have large jaws, large faces, long arms, low and narrow foreheads, large ears, excess hair, darker skin, insensitivity to pain, and an inability to blush! It’s easy to see the racial stereotypes of Lombroso’s description, how society’s “others” were automatically identified as criminal. The idea of identifying “natural-born killers” caught the attention of many anthropologists and law enforcement officials in the late-1800s and, even though Lombroso’s work was later repudiated (many of his assertions were not supported by objective data), it spawned a great deal of activity in the search for real, measurable traits that would assist the police in identifying criminals. One of them, a French police clerk named Alphonse Bertillon (Ber-TEE-yin), devised a complex system of anthropometric measurements, photographs, and a detailed description (which he called a portrait parlé) in 1883; it was later to be called Bertillonage, after its inventor. At that time, the body was considered to be constant and, as Lombroso’s work then maintained, reflective of one’s inner nature. Bertillon’s system was devised to quantify the body; by his method, Bertillon hoped to identify criminals as they were arrested and booked for their transgressions. Repeat offenders, those whom we would today call career criminals or recidivists, were at that time considered a particular problem to European police agencies. The growing capitals and cities of Europe allowed for a certain anonymity, and criminals were free to travel from city to city or country to country, changing their names along the way as they plied their illegal trades. Bertillon hoped that his new system would allow the identification of criminals, no matter where they appeared and, thus, help authorities keep track of undesirables (Cole, 2001). Bertillonage was considered the premier method of identification for at least two decades—despite its limitations. The entire Bertillonage of a person was a complicated and involved process requiring an almost obsessive attention to detail. This made it difficult to standardize and, therefore, replicate accurately. Bertillon often lamented the lack of skill he saw in operators he himself had not trained. If the way the measurements were taken varied, then the same person might not be identified as such by two different operators. The portrait parlé added distinctive descriptors to aid the identification process, but here, again, the adjectives lacked precise objective definitions. “Lips might be ‘pouting,’ ‘thick or thin,’ ‘upper or lower prominent,’ with ‘nasolabial height great or little’ with or without a ‘border’” writes Simon Cole, quoting from Bertillon’s own instruction manual . What was meant by pouting, prominent, or little was better defined in Bertillon’s mind than in the manual. Bertillonage was used across Britain and in its colonies, especially India. The officials in the Bengal office were concerned with its utility, however. They won dered if Bertillonage could distinguish individuals within the Indian population. Another concern the Bengali officials had with Bertillonage was the inconsistency between operators. There were variations in the way operators took the measurements: Some rounded the results up and some rounded them down, and some opera tors even decided which measurements were to be taken and which ones could be ignored. Staff in the Bengal office even attempted to solve the variance problem by mechanizing the system. All these variances made searches tedious, difficult, and ultimately prone to error, defeating the point of using the method. The problem became so extreme that the Bengal office dropped Bertillonage entirely except for one small component of the system: fingerprints. Maintaining this component of the Bertillonage system begged for a way to classify fingerprints systematically and this was the limiting factor in the adoption of any identification system. Bertillonage was too cumbersome and finicky to systematize for quick sorting, as were photographs. Additionally, with the growing number of individuals who were being logged in to police records, any system of identification had to be able to handle hundreds, thousands, and eventually thousands of thousands of records quickly, correctly, and remotely.
