Mugshot’s Bias: A Semantic History of Guilt

Abstract

There is a serious problem of innocent people being sentenced to prison in the United States. According to a study by the Innocence Project organization, between 2.3% and 5% of prisoners are innocent. The lowest percentage of this figure would imply that over 46,000 innocent people are incarcerated. Eyewitness misidentification is the most common factor involved in miscarriages of justice. Although numerous studies have identified the reasons behind these errors, and various proposals have made to avoid misidentifications in photo lineups, there appears to be no research on the impact of the mugshot as an unmistakable type of image. This paper demonstrates, from the field of visual culture and with a historical semantic consideration of the advent of police portraiture in the United States, that mugshots carry a stigma of guilt. When a witness is shown such photographs, not only do they see the objective description of an individuals’ physical features but juxtapose the mark of criminality to these portraits. This mark increases the likelihood of the witness choosing one of the pictures even though none of the individuals in them is guilty of the crime under investigation.