Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Investigation (review)

Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Investigation. By Simon Cole (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2001) 369 pp. $35.00

Cole's Suspect Identities is a masterful examination of the ways in which science, bureaucratic imperatives, and popular fears intersected to create major shifts in the techniques and prestige of the criminal-justice system. Historians of science, cultural history, and criminal justice, as well as practitioners within the judicial system, will find his book both fascinating and troubling.

Cole's book is a review of the problem of identifying criminals, particularly through fingerprinting, during the past 200 years. According to Cole, colonial empires overseas and rapid social change at home (especially urbanization) combined to create a pressing need for better methods to identify deviants. Thus evolved a variety of efforts to describe and categorize the physical characteristics of individual criminals—especially repeat offenders—so that officials of the state could always recognize and control them. Photography, Bertillonage, fingerprints, and, most recently, DNA typing have all attracted their adherents.

Cole argues that the effort to establish identities and make connections to crimes was a creative cultural process in which hard science did not determine the outcome. State bureaucrats relied on both their own and the public's belief in the veracity of science to construct identifica-tion systems. Cole creatively and convincingly demonstrates that European and American (North as well as South) cultural commitments privileged scientific approaches to social issues over other methods. Although this preference may not seem particularly surprising, Cole is particularly adept at showing how a claim to scientific rigor foreclosed serious questioning of that claim's validity.

That distinction is the basis for Cole's principal concern about the long struggle to establish a criminal's identity. He documents not only how fingerprinting came to dominate that struggle; he also reveals how disturbing deficiencies in the now-widespread reliance on partial prints as the basis for "positive" identification evolved, and how that development has created potential, as well as actual, problems for individual and minority rights.

Cole bases his careful exegesis of the process by which fingerprint-ing came to be enshrined in the criminal-justice system on an exhaustive and far-ranging analysis of French, British, South American, and North American sources. He is also well versed in the technical characteristics and scientific validity of the identification systems that he analyzes. Cole's implicit concerns about the potential abuse of authority through the misuse of flawed techniques for establishing connections between individuals and their alleged crimes, however, outweigh any explicit theoretical discussion of the processes by which scientific and technological processes become diffused throughout a particular culture. Cole tells an important story, and he tells it well.