Contents:
The police and the courts wanted to know with whom they were dealing, and methods of identifying persons on wanted lists or apprehended persons, as well as ways of communicating descriptions, were matters of increasing concern. The burgeoning sciences of anthropology, medicine, and biology began to suggest scientific solutions to the problem.
Before the science of criminology was established and invented its own particular methods of identification, many experts on crime and criminals, such as judges, anthropologists or medical men, published scores of manuals and descriptions of criminal behaviour, activities and lifestyle. However, it is important to note that the law-enforcement agencies did not immediately embrace photography as the panacea for their problem.
It took decades before they reluctantly did so. These collections were used to identify a criminal who had recently committed a crime. To serve this need, most photographic files were classified by crime, thus reflecting the contemporary criminological conviction that most criminals would adhere to their type of criminal behaviour. Finally, in practice, most apprehensions after the s were and remained due to conventional means of detection, although many criminal police departments issued figures of successful identifications by photographs 3. If portraits of criminals provided a means of investigating the facial features of individuals, there is no evidence that they were scrutinised by the police with any specialised method e.
The approach of the police seems to have been purely empirical. Detectives and senior police officers rarely reflected on the practice of photography before the turn of the century. They probably used police photographs just as they used their own pictures: The search for distinguishing details, the minute clues and intriguing trace typical of scientific police work, was not yet common when the police started to use photographs. Neither were photographs essential for the classification of records. How and why were photographs, which represented a method of identification based on everyday experience and not on scientific principles as Bertillon's anthropometric system claimed to be , integrated into the system of knowledge of the law-enforcement agencies 6?
The question of why photography was applied comparatively late as an instrument of the criminal police was never raised. And if so, who and what was surveyed and how? Is photography part of a Foucauldian panopticon: If so, again the question arises: Surely the introduction of the image into the dossiers can be seen as an important step towards the completion of the system. It improved the chances of identification, to a certain extent, and it was a form of symbolic apprehension of a person. However this should not be overemphasised because, in a different context, a published image of a wanted person stresses exactly the opposite: It is well worth recalling that the common photographic portrait was a sign of respectability, and the arrangements in the studios represented, or hinted at, a respectable environment.
Here, the individuality of the human subjects was of secondary importance. When an institution of the state used portraits, individuality was exactly what was needed. This resulted in a tension between the social function of portrait photography as a proof of respectability and its administrative function, as a means of recording, identifying, and detecting. Consequently, every portrait not only represented a person, but was a potential means of detection as well, a conclusion which was, for many at least, uncomfortable to draw.
However he concentrates on France and Bertillon, and the structural similarities between medical, anthropological, and police photography which merged in Bertillon's scientific thought.
Thus, the use of photography for law enforcement is systematised into a period before and after Bertillon, thereby evoking the idea of an inevitable, slow, but linear, development. The discourse which reshaped judicial photography changed by converging scientific, criminal, anthropological and medical photography into a universal instrument to construct and distinguish images of normal and aberrant people However, in practice , photography in prisons and in the service of the police remained what it had been even after the redefinition of its function in the late s and s.
The differences in the concepts and use of photography in the prisons and in the service of the police are therefore highlighted in the following paragraphs. The investigation of emerging criminology has obscured the fact that Cesare Lombroso or Francis Galton used already existing images to support their arguments. The pictures were not taken according to criminological theories but integrated into a new framework of interpretation The photographic evidence used by Lombroso or Galton was ambiguous and as much open to criticism as the other conclusions of both criminologists The development of photography within the penal institutions and, especially within the police, is marked by a constant struggle to establish specific patterns of interpretation against a very strong and often prevailing commonsensical practice of taking and looking at photographs.
Drawing from Swiss, English, French, and German sources, the contingent use of photographs in the penal system is presented as its main feature.
The advocates of judicial photography developed their respective approaches independently. The following examples show who began to experiment with photography and why. For analytical purposes, three periods of implementation can be distinguished: Interest in and experiments with photography in prisons and courts were exceptional and have to be analysed with due care. The scheme of the Swiss Attorney General, Jacob Amiet, in and the experiments of English prison governors in the early s illustrate the importance of these motives.
The images were intended as a supplement to the files and as a means of identifying vagrants when they were apprehended again. Lithographic copies of the images were distributed to the police forces throughout the Swiss cantons. It was never designed to be a new general means of fighting crime and criminals, and it did not inspire other European governments to do the same Furthermore, the images provided a means of inquiry into the nature of the vagrants as a group.
However, it is not known whether the scheme was successful, and by the experiment was discontinued These people were seen as a danger to the fragile Swiss Republic, which had suffered a civil war in Sonderbundskrieg followed by a new constitution in Similar to developments in other European countries, the Swiss government was very sensitive with regard to the free movement of portions of its population in the early s.
Amiet's zeal and open-minded approach to technological development, together with the political circumstances, made the experiment possible and explain why it was discontinued a couple of years later when these circumstances had changed. In a report to the Select Committee of the House of Lords on prison discipline in 21 , the head of Bristol Goal, Gardener, mentioned that he had begun to take photographs of prisoners in He was an amateur photographer and took the pictures himself using a stereoscopic camera.
Stereoscopic images, when looked at with a special viewer, produced the illusion of three dimensions. As in Switzerland, photographs were used to make a record of mobile people not known to the local police forces. To both Croften and Gardener, photographs were of good use in the recognition of recidivists. For various reasons, recidivists and the Irish in general were seen as a key problem to English prison officers. While Croften asserted their bad influence on first-time offenders, Gardener emphasised the importance of identifying a prisoner as a recidivist because the law called for harsher punishment for the latter However the prison inspectors were not convinced and did not recommend the practice They thus confirmed the reluctance of the prison administration to see a real advantage in photographic recording.
In France, the initiative to apply photography to legal purposes came from a prison governor as well. But nothing indicates that these proposals where even discussed by the prison administration or the police. A couple of years later, in , the governor of the prison at Clairvaux was equally unsuccessful with a proposal to introduce photography. All the proposals made in the s and s had no impact on the police or the prison administration The discourse on photography was still without links to the discourse on the penal system. Moreau-Christophe had published his ideas in a photographic journal and, as the answer of the Ministry of the Interior shows, photographing prisoners was not seen as a means of recording, but as a punishment.
Perhaps the conviction prevailed in the Ministry that it was rather a degradation of a bourgeois practice which relied on a free decision and implied equal rights on both sides: Uneasiness about the prospect of confounding a respectable person with a criminal by using photographs was not restricted to English gentlemen an uneasiness which cannot be found in the debate on photographs of the mentally insane discussed in the same period. More than ten years later, the Prussian jurist, Karl Theodor Odebrecht, although an advocate of the introduction of photography into the court rooms, voiced a similar concern Their common aim was to introduce scientific methods into prison administration and to obtain a new kind of knowledge about certain types of offenders.
Photography was also applied as a means to get a clearer idea of the groups conceived by the respective governments, at a specific time, as major threats to public order. At the same time, photographing those offenders displayed the government's ability to identify and to fight them. It was intended as a measure to build confidence in the authority of the state.
It was the alleged dan-gerousness of an offender which merited the application of photography. Which groups of offenders were deemed dangerous changed with time and place. In Switzerland around , vagrancy was seen as the problem which merited paramount attention. To some British prison officers, mobile and Irish offenders seemed especially dangerous and a force which undermined prison discipline. For a judge, a complete record first-time offender or recidivist? Photographic portraits were not a means of surveillance in the sense of a panopticon because the latter's main feature in theory was the possibility of controlling any prisoner at any time and to interfere immediately if an inmate behaved suspiciously.
In general, photography was still too deeply embedded in bourgeois culture and not conceived of as a method to record, detect and apprehend villains. Hardly any police official from the s to the late s imagined photography as a tool to identify ordinary criminals or considered the collection of portraits as an adequate means of recording known offenders. There was no need for large photographic files because many police officers were convinced they knew the criminal class or criminal population of their district, except the small minority of strangers and mobile offenders.
Friedrich Christian Benedict Ave-Lallemant, one of the best-known advocates of police reform in Germany, only casually mentioned photography in his theoretical works. Although he referred briefly to portraits of unknown or wanted persons that appeared in police publications at the end of the s, Ave-Lallemant did not conceive of photography as a means of detection or recording The criminals as well as their hiding places and connections described in this novel were known to the authorities.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the majority of policemen conceived of criminals as rather immobile or moving only locally, a concept of criminal behaviour which Ave-Lallemant's younger colleagues would challenge some decades later. To Ave-Lallemant, the majority of those pictures showed good-natured faces and provided no hints to corroborate physiognomic theories about the distinct features of criminals The criminal, he stressed, could be found everywhere and in every social class However publishing images was not common.
Sometimes portraits were distributed as a preventive measure when a person labelled dangerous was about to be released from jail On this unsophisticated basis, the police in Paris, London and Berlin, collected photographs on a small scale It was a measure pertaining to single cases and not the beginning of a collection of images intended to supplement existing records. It was usually the last resort to clarify the identity of a person. The political offender did not threaten the health or goods of a single person or family, but - in the eyes of the governments - the whole public order.
These people were not simply criminals, and a Karl Marx or a Giuseppe Mazzini had a bourgeois background socially equal to their prosecutors'. There were possibly other occasions when photographic or lithographic portraits of political offenders were circulated to ensure detection if any of them entered a German state. Detection was not yet conceived of as a scientific process. These were ad hoc, unsystematic measures, which relied on the universal belief that photographic portraits were the best representations one could possibly obtain of a person.
There was no consistent rule as to which cases merited a search aided by photography but one: Developments in photography, society and policing were responsible for this change. The general discourse on photography altered. Photography became more reliable and simple, and began to provide a general means of recording and representation for every conceivable need. Portrait photography grew into a more sophisticated practice, on the one hand, and, on the other, more people could afford it, thus shifting the function of social distinction towards price, style and the format of the images.
The organisation and aims of the police in general were restructured, culminating in the establishment of independent criminal police departments in the greater cities. The most important aims of these new departments were the prevention of crime and detection of criminals by scientific means and professional methods. A system borrowed from anthropology 42 was slowly, but not universally adopted: The Fenian outrages of and the Irish question added another urgent problem After the Habitual Criminals Act was passed in supplemented by the Prevention of Crimes Act in , a photographic register was established at the Metropolitan Police Office.
The whole system was intended as a service to the prison administration and to the courts. Responsible for the collection, however, was not the prison administration, which was not centralised, but the Metropolitan Police, which managed the Habitual Criminals Register. In the initial period from November to December , the Habitual Criminals Register collected more than 43 photographs of prisoners from penitentiaries in England and Wales The number of successful identifications was relatively small, in general, the normal rate being between one and five per submitted collection Altogether, the data was not conclusive.
Christian sentenced to death for 'blaspheming against Islam ' ". French authorities monitored them until the spring of Several others may have been injured as well but no one was killed in the gunfire. If portraits of criminals provided a means of investigating the facial features of individuals, there is no evidence that they were scrutinised by the police with any specialised method e. Michael Morell , former deputy director of the CIA , suggested that the motive of the attackers was "absolutely clear: Retrieved 13 January
And even less so because there were no comparable figures of successful identifications by non-photographic means. Still the most common method of recognising habitual offenders in London and Paris as well was to send police officers to the prisons to check whether there were any known offenders among the newly imprisoned Public opinion was divided: The Photographic News was very much in favour of the scheme, the Daily News challenged its efficacy, and the Daily Telegraph questioned its legality, echoing the objection of the French Ministry of the Interior in The Prevention of Crimes Act set out the rules by which convicts were to be photographed, thus indicating that the Habitual Criminal Office was never intended as a central identification office for all offenders By , the scheme was reduced as it had already become cumbersome as early as The year of the Commune, , was crucial for the introduction of photography into the agencies of law enforcement.
The Minister, Vice Admiral Pothuau, added that the photographs should be filed with the court records, a copy of which should be sent to the archives of the Ministry. The Ministry of War immediately adopted the proposal for the army. Contrary to the s and s, the scheme was adopted.
The wish to restore public order ushered in the camera as an instrument to record those who were apprehended for taking part in the insurrection. However, the plan seems to have been scaled down after a couple of years: However, in eight years, more than 75 portraits amounted to a cumbersome and unmanageable collection In England, as already shown, a similar plan was scaled down after some years of experience with the Habitual Criminals Register.
One year later, the collection consisted of nine albums with portraits, which was only a fraction of the people apprehended or sentenced.
It seems that the criminal police of Berlin initially avoided the mistakes made in Paris and London, and kept the number of records as low as possible, but this only delayed the collapse of the system. In comparison, the system introduced in Berlin probably originated with the police itself.
Still, this shift of authority from prison to police is remarkable. The concept of the habitual criminal contributed to the growing importance of the police and prompted the administration to refine the system of registration and identification now under the auspices of the criminal police. Portrait photographs provided a means of recording and detection in tune with emerging modern methods of policing.
They supplemented the practice of description with a technical aid. A photograph was conceived of as a recorded appearance. It was natural, then, to classify the images by crime, as it was natural to take pictures according to the practice of commercial photographers to which the public was accustomed. They had to rely on commercial photographers. Looking back from , not even Friedrich Paul, author of the authoritative handbook of criminal photography for German-speaking countries, could trace any English, German, or French articles of substance on this matter that had been published before The absence of a discourse on criminal photography in the years between and speaks of an unsophisticated use of photography.
Furthermore, as the French example showed, there were only very faint links between the photographic and the judicial discourse. The police's approach was still guided by popular notions about photography and by the practical gaze 59 representing the experience of daily police work. Usually a commercial photographer was commissioned to take the pictures 60 , and they were produced in the average style of contemporary portrait photography.
The decision as to who was to be photographed followed a simple principle: This system focused attention on habitual criminals or on criminals suspected of becoming habitual. In theory, nobody apprehended for petty, familial, religious and political offences should be photographed The figures offered an image of diligence and zeal in view of investigating the phenomenon and dimensions of crime. It was a measure designed to build confidence in the ability of the criminal police to fight crime by legitimate means and it helped enhance the reputation of the criminal police which, in France for example, was not good 62 , and in Britain had yet to be built up.
New systems of classification and cross-referencing were necessary to render the records useful. The classification of the collections by crime served only one special need, but was useless as a general system of identification. In a report on the budget of the Prefecture de Police in Paris, the author claimed that the whole photographic service had - as of - not yielded any practical result at all Practical results would have amounted to a discernible increase in detections and identifications.
Instead, there were none at all or, at least, there was no affirmative proof for this. What, then, to pinpoint the argument, were the collections good for in practical detective work, apart from the occasional identification obtained by leafing through the albums? In short, it did not match professional and scientific standards.
Solving this problem demanded a new approach. It was Alphonse Bertillon who offered a non-photographic solution in He constructed his system of identification around a couple of measurements of the adult body which could not be altered and thus made images unnecessary. Most frequent English dictionary requests: Please click on the reason for your vote: This is not a good example for the translation above.
The wrong words are highlighted. It does not match my search. It should not be summed up with the orange entries The translation is wrong or of bad quality. Thank you very much for your vote! You helped to increase the quality of our service. Be law-abiding and have no record of criminal activity you may be asked [ You may have [ Respecter la loi et ne pas avoir de casier judiciaire vous aurez [ Se e Police C e rt ificates [ Respecter la loi et ne pas savoir de casier [ Historically, it is not unusual to see refusals under subsections 16 1 and 11 1 of IRPA in cases, for example, where even after a fairness letter has been sent out by the visa office, an applicant has refused to undergo medicals or [ If you have not been [ If you are unable [ As the legal representative, you may [ If the seller does not pay tax [ If so, you will have [ Si c'est le cas, [ Processing crime through the justice system will [