Weekend reading as you rest.. excerpts from a book i am reading thatrelate to our efforts

["Diane.Lewis@usdoj.gov" <Diane.Lewis@usdoj.gov>]

Greetings!
as we continue work on the TC initiatives ... i came across a great book at the Smithsonian Museum, WASH DC book store titled <Suspect Identities a history of fingerprinting and criminal identification> by Simon A. Cole, Cornell University, USA...

brief Summary and  excerpts  that i am reflecting on.. and wanted to share with you...  there are so many possibilities for us to consider... and we were not around in the 19th Century..... but may be it is good to reflect on where we have been...  have a nice weekend  cheers diane

Sum = " Dr. Cole excavates the history of criminal identification from photography to exotic anthropometric systems based on measuring body parts, from fingerprinting to DNA typing. , this history uncovers the fascinating interplay of our elusive individuality, police and state power, and the quest for scientific certainty."

Excerpts = Dr. Cole's book...

"The marking of the criminal record replced the marking of the criminal body."

"...all these innumerable documents, collected with a great deal of care and effort, lie in the judicial registers, as in catacombs, whence it is almost impossible to extract information needed from them in a timely manner.  The problem was not collecting information but accessing it. "

"as an improvement on alphabetcial registers, Bonneville developed a new method of criminal identification by adopting technologies of recordkeeping, treating criminal bodies as merchants treated consignments or librarians treated books."

"The British register was also notable for its creators' failure to heed Bonneville's suggestion to use index cards. by recording descriptions in annual bound volumes, ... created just the kind of register Bonneville had criticized thirty years earlier: a source of information that became obsolete as soon it was published because of a format that did not allow information to be compiled over time."

" the fact that a scheme as labor-intensive as the Register of Distinctive Marks signaled their desperate need for any kind of identification system., Clumsy though it may have been, the Register was the earliest attempt to arrange individual records not according to names but according to physical descriptions... "

"Theoretical discussions of using fingerprints for criminal identification began in the late 1870s, Anthropometry emerged int he cities of Europe, while fingerprinting developed in the colonies and on the frontiers of the Western states.  Each system made sense within the context in which it was developed."

"1879" "the solution to the problem of judicial identification consists less in the search for new characteristic elements of individuality than in the discovery of a method of classification.  the problem was to organize and access the information that had been collected."

"Bertillon envisioned nothing less than the complete reduction of human identity to a language notations which could be organized and accessed at will.  ....  Bertillon reduced the body to language and then to code turning the criminal body into pure information. In this way he was able to link criminal bodies to themselves across both time (from one arrest to another) and space (from one locale to another, responding to the intensifying desire of communities to apprehend the stranger, the vargrant, and the deviant."

"The criminal record and case history replaced branding and mutilation as a means of identification and control."

"The wardens explicitly invoked the power of knowledge for controlling and modeling the prisoner.  by seeking to know the real desert of every criminal brought up for sentence, by knowing his parentage, his moral perceptibilities, physical structure, habits of life when not in confinement, the temptations he failed to resist, and the causes that have driven him into criminal pursuits.."