The subjects of criminal identification

Abstract

This article analyses two late 19th-century technologies that sought to identify criminals with scientific accuracy: Alphonse Bertillon's techniques for measuring bodies and Francis Galton's composite portraits of criminal types. It analyzes the regulatory environment in England in which their ideas achieved considerable prominence, emphasizing crucial differences in the visions of `science' embraced by the two men. By highlighting their different claims to science, this article outlines their respective legacies in criminal identification arenas, and isolates unique dangers associated with each. Those dangers variously alert us to the importance of questioning a persistent, if often implicit, sentiment within much criminal justice thinking; namely, by identifying individual criminals, or criminal types, justice systems effectively address the problem of crime. Against this approach, and resonant with a critical criminology in search of less exclusionary ways to govern, the following analysis considers criminal identification not as a discovery but a creation. In so doing, it seeks to re-politicize current practices of criminalization, challenge claims to the purported scientific impartiality of criminal identification and embrace the possibility of justice beyond a dominant reflex to create criminals.