0043 // "You Can't Get Away With It Twice: Alphonse Bertillon's Taxonomy of the Damned"

The annals of crime are thick with thieves.

Until the late 19th century—and in many places, well into the 20th —the identities of arrested criminals were kept in bound, specially ruled notebooks, like accountants’ ledgers. Criminals were booked in chronological order, by their stated name, and sometimes with a few words of description. Vague details, poorly expressed: age, occupation, eye color, scars.

You would find a thousand stories flipping through the crumbling pages of such a book.

What you would not find is any particular person you might be looking for. You would not have at your fingertips any way of comparing a criminal whose collar is under your thumb to criminals who had been caught before in your city, let alone criminals roaming the surrounding counties and countries, those who had crossed borders to evade the law, to evade any recognition of their faces or names or their M.O.s.

Mobility creates opportunity. And preserves it.

These two problems twined together around the wrists of the law for hundreds if not thousands of years.

A vexing administrative dilemma, to be sure. It perhaps mattered most in cases of imposture. A caught criminal is a caught criminal, to be cleared of a crime or punished for it. Whether they were wanted elsewhere, whether they pulled the same tricks from place to place, year in and year out, mattered little.

Over the course of the 19th century, though, a new concept slowly took hold. Arbiters of justice began to wring their hands over the idea of recidivism, repeated crimes. They constructed ideas about differential punishment for one-time criminals than for repeat offenders, which could extend even to exile. The idea of recidivism, as a cultural problem, gained personhood. The recidivist, the habitual offender, the born criminal. Thieves, impostors, prostitutes, vagrants.
Preventing recidivism, throwing the book at recidivists and denying them mercy, that required something better than the ledger books, a pale substitute for tracking criminals. It was a problem of order. The order of information.

Enter Alphonse Bertillon, of the Paris police department. One of his century’s most brilliant bureaucrats, he would not be outfoxed by these slippery and changeable identities.

Bertillon looked deep into the body for a immutable identity.
He developed a system called anthropometry, which took 13 physical measurements that, he claimed, do not change after adulthood, and which in combination are sufficiently distinct to rule out a match with any other person whose measurements have been recorded.
He also transformed the ragtag habits of description used by police into a system of classification with precise criteria and precise notations.

Bertillon looked deep into the body for a immutable identity.
He developed a system called anthropometry, which took 13 physical measurements that, he claimed, do not change after adulthood, and which in combination are sufficiently distinct to rule out a match with any other person whose measurements have been recorded.
He also transformed the ragtag habits of description used by police into a system of classification with precise criteria and precise notations.

Hundreds of variations in eye color, dozens of nose shapes, chin shapes, ear shapes, locations of and descriptions of scars and marks.
He took the haphazard practice of photographing criminals and created the standard poses and lighting still in use today.
All of this together creates a portrait parlé, a “speaking portrait” of each individual. The entire process became known as Bertillonage.

Hundreds of variations in eye color, dozens of nose shapes, chin shapes, ear shapes, locations of and descriptions of scars and marks.
He took the haphazard practice of photographing criminals and created the standard poses and lighting still in use today.
All of this together creates a portrait parlé, a “speaking portrait” of each individual. The entire process became known as Bertillonage.

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Two remarkable things can be done with this positivistic information, each taking advantage of a major invention of the century, one in communications and one in bureaucracy itself.
First, this standardized, written information can accurately transmitted by telegraph.
- Second, this standardized information can be indexed. And thus, it may go without saying, searched.
- To make this possible, Bertillon used one of the most radical inventions in information processing: the index card.

The outputs of the system were known as Bertillon cards. The system could be replicated precisely in different locations, standardizing criminal identification. Every city had the reference book that showed all the eye colors and nose types, etc. The cards could then be filed and cross-indexed in numerous ways. Bertillon claimed that a trained operator, like those in his Paris bureau or the NYC police department, could find a match in a matter of hours. It was a process of both elimination and deduction. Anthropometry eliminates identities, while physical description and identifying marks establish them

The trained operator, did you notice that part? That turned out to be the coffin’s nail for Bertillon’s system. It didn’t work without precision.
But Bertillonage was the gold standard for decades in big city police departments, though not universally, and even well into the 20th century some criminals were still kept track of in notebooks. Pages from the Hollywood police department’s log in the 1950s included descriptive notes like these:
Photography Credits: Mark Michaelson

*

Meanwhile, fingerprints, which had been used for a long time in identity documents and were not thought to be accurate enough to use in such a high-stakes situation as the identification of a criminal, began to seem more appealing. Taking the impressions was simple and quick, and nobody bothered much about the stain of the ink.
Over time, the apparatus of the law began to see an appealing reliability in fingerprints, but it was slow to change. Bertillonage survived as long as it did because the indices for searching it were already in place. Relying on fingerprints demanded new indices, replicated across distance.

Bertillonage remained in use for the same reasons that many institutions rely on outdated technology – because updating the database, the index, is too much of a misery.

Structure is destiny. Bringing order to the entropy of information is part of what technology can do. But technology resists change, and order is stubborn
*

Kio Stark is the author of When Strangers Meet, a love song about the poetics, politics, and practicalities of talking to strangers. Her other books are the novel Follow Me Down and the independent learning handbook Don’t Go Back to School. She lives and talks to strangers in Brooklyn, New York.

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