Suitable for Framing: Fingerprints and the Rise of Criminal Identification

Simon Cole finished writing Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001; 369 pp., $35) before the terrorist attacks of 11 September and the spate of highly publicized child abductions in America, both of which have made fingerprinting and other identification technologies extremely topical in the last year. But he most certainly understood the courtroom use of fingerprint evidence to be a "mammoth enterprise" and recognized the formative role of identification technologies in the particular uses to which industrialized nations put state apparatus. Thus, this book helps immensely in our understanding of how such recent events have been approached by governments, law enforcement agencies, and the public, in addition to providing a detailed and highly readable account of historical approaches to human identification.

Fingerprinting, systems of bodily measurement ("anthropometry"), and other descriptive indexes, of which DNA profiling is the most prominent recent example, gained their imaginative hold on Europe and the Americas as industrialization and expanding populations brought new concerns about crime to many polities. Used widely by 1900 for both forensic purposes (linking an individual to a crime) and record keeping (establishing patterns of recidivism, a perpetual concern of law enforcement and penal officials), such techniques carried broader implications for civil society through their ability to sort individuals and fix their membership in particular categories. Cole is by no means the first historian to recognize the utility of identification systems for colonialization, immigration control, and agendas of class, race, or caste differentiation. Inspired by Foucault, scholars began some time ago to historicize our understanding of "the body" and factor those beliefs into histories of criminology, state formation, and the organization of modern work; by now, the names of Bertillon, Galton, and Lombroso are probably as well known as that of J. Edgar Hoover in academic circles. What Cole does particularly well is digest various scholarly spins on such associations and then, with tremendous care, link prevailing ideologies of crime and deviance, bureaucratic structures, and the material features that characterized the identification methods of each era. Into this last category fall both physiological matters—such as the huge variety of fingertip whorls and ridges that make fingerprints optimal as identity markers—and the practical challenges that arise around the notation and classification of such information, without which no collection of fingerprints, for example, would be searchable.

Whether constituted of fingerprints, bodily measurements, mug shots, or genetic samples, every database intended to associate individuals with written records or other unique locators requires reliable means of data acquisition, assemblage, indexing, and dissemination, and Cole depicts all as both conceptual and technical tasks. In so doing, he provides a crucial addition to the scant literature on technology and race. Through Cole's careful reading of how bodies of information find mobility and credibility in a given time and place—colonial India; Argentina or California in periods of heavy immigration; contemporary judicial systems in Britain and the United States—we start to understand the mutually reinforcing nature of inequitable social systems and racialist technologies. Ideologies of nationhood and race give rise to and are supported by civil and criminal administrative systems, of which fingerprinting, anthropometry, or DNA profiles can be integral elements.

For example, in many instances cited here white officials turned to identifying nonwhite individuals by bodily features because the facial features of those individuals were deemed indistinguishable—the repellant chestnut that "all Chinese [or Black] people look alike." Cole shows that the existence of databases of fingerprints or bodily measurements encouraged that perception by turning officials away from the faces and expressive characters of their subjects and, not insignificantly, from the names and other "unverifiable" self-identifiers subjects might claim (one 1909 advocate celebrated fingerprinting as "the voiceless speech"! [pp. 166-67]). DNA profiles today perform the same work of simultaneously distinguishing one individual from all others while suppressing those personal features such as name or countenance or chosen affiliation...