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Forensic Science

Crime has always been clandestine, but in the nineteenth century it had become clandestine in new and different ways. There were more mysterious crimes: dead bodies nobody could identify, thefts where the thieves skipped from town to town, and city to city—this in addition to the crimes already discussed in which identity also was an issue. The problems of secrecy, identity, and mobility set off a search for countermeasures, for new ways to find and label criminals. This was the century, then, of forensic science. It took all the ingenuity and technology of the century to keep up with the consequences of mobility. New York’s detectives, we are told, were “in constant telegraphic communication with other cities,” exchanging information about crimes and criminals. By the 1870s New York’s detectives were using photographs of criminals for purposes of identification, collecting them in a “rogues’ gallery.”49

Another advance was the “Bertillon method,” which was the rage in police departments at the end of the century. The system was named after Alphonse Bertillon, a Frenchman who worked for the Paris police, in the 1880s. Bertillon, a “young man with pale, thin, dismal face, slow movements, and an expressionless voice,” who “suffered from bad digestion, nosebleeds, and terrible headaches,” became obsessed with the problem of identifying criminals precisely.50 The Bertillon method called for very exact physical measurements (length and width of the head, the dimensions of the feet, and so on), and very exact notations about scars and other features. Bertillon eventually devised a scheme that used eleven physical dimensions of body and limbs. This scheme, along with the use of photographs, made identification of criminals much more rigorous.51 In the 1890s the Bertillon method became standard in police departments. Fingerprinting at first supplemented it, then later supplanted it.

The need for scientific rigor also affected the ancient office of the coroner, who held “inquests” when nobody was sure exactly how a particular body had become a corpse. In big cities, the coroner was something of a throwback. The coroner was a layman, often an undertaker, usually an elected official. Coroners and lay juries of inquest were all well and good in an old village, but big-time mysterious death required something better. As early as 1858, a committee of the American Medical Association suggested giving the coroner’s job only to a “competent and respectable doctor in medicine.”52 Massachusetts abolished the office of coroner in 1877. Instead, each county was to designate “able and discreet men, learned in the science of medicine, to be medical examiners.” 53ap

Mobility and Crime

In the nineteenth century, the culture of mobility and the culture of criminal justice were deeply intertwined and deeply interinvolved. Amateur justice does not work well in a society of cities, a society of people constantly moving about. Professionals are needed. The community cannot rely on gossips, on posses, on lay people in the halls of justice and in the correctional system. Hence the need for police, detectives, prison officials, medical examiners, forensic scientsts, and, in general, a growing army of criminal justice workers.

The relationship between the mobile society and criminality itself is tough and elusive. Serious crime, however defined, is related to rootlessness—to shifting and moving about—in various ways. To begin with, the shifting and moving creates special opportunities for crime; it encourages some kinds of crime. Swindling and bigamy were given as examples; there are certainly others. For example, the “fence,” who deals in stolen property and makes markets for stolen goods, became an important figure in large cities, where goods are fungible and anonymous.55 In the second place, the rootless and mobile fill the ranks of the criminal class—those who take advantage of the new opportunities. But these people also fill the ranks of victims of criminal (in)justice: they