captured criminal far more permanently than is done by photography. It is the object of this chapter, after recalling some elementary facts in regard to pauperism and reformation, to place the claims and mechanism of the scheme of M. Bertillon before the public. PAUPERISM. The word pauperism is here charged with a definite meaning. A pauper is one living upon public taxes. Universal poverty and much starvation may arise even in agricultural communities from the disease of a crop, as in Ireland in 1845, or from periodical drought, as in India, or from unmerciful taxation, as in the "age of Louis XIV," when the peasantry were compelled to starve themselves for fear of quickening the inventive powers of the taxgatherer to create new forms of exaction. But the impounding the poor at the expense of the parish-the creation of a.legal poor-is due to the poor laws of England, which have steadily elevated the cost of keeping the claimants for charity from $3,500,000 in 1750 to $40,000.000 in 1885, or about $50 for each of the 800,000 paupers in England and Wales. If this burden had been equally distributed, the amount paid by each person of the population would have been nearly $1.75 in 1885, though but 55 cents in 1750. Yet the original motive of this effort to "relieve the poor was not philanthropy. England was swarming with vagabonds, beggars, or tramps, and to relieve the apprehensions of the stationary and self-supporting part of the population a series of coercive acts was passed during the reign of the family of Tudor compared to which the late compulsory school laws of our Eastern States in that particular are child's play. The preamble of the act of 1576 is expressed in these terms: To the intent that youth may be accustomed and brought up to labor, and then not like to grow up to be idle rogues, and to the intent also that such as be already grown up in idleness and are such rogues at this present may not have any just excuse in saying that they can not get any service or work, and that other poor and needy persons being willing to labor may be set to work, be it enacted, etc. In the United States there were in 1890 73,045 paupers in almshouses, of whom 36,656 were native-born whites, 6,467 colored persons, and 27,648 were white foreigners. As the increase of criminals in the United States has been connected in one way or another with a public education which "permits children to grow up without a means of earning a living," it is proper to ask whether the growth of paupers in almshouses is proportional to the growth of criminals in prisons. Comparison. (1) WITHOUT REGARD TO INCREASE IN POPULATION. Prisoners Prisoners. (2) RELATIVELY TO POPULATION (1 IN EVERY 1,000,000). a Not including outdoor paupers for any year except perhaps in 1870, just before which date the State board of charities of Massachusetts recommended that that State ought not to estab lish any more aimshouses, but should eke out private and municipal charities. It is quite as logical to ascribe the great diminution in the number of paupers shown in this comparison to the influence of the public schools as to ascribe the smaller increase in the number of criminals to that cause. Both sets of figures are published in the last census, and therefore one set is as good as the other. But outside of any statistical statement, how it is possible to reconcile any connection of education with increase in vagabondage and criminality if in times when even members of the English House of Lords could not read it was found necessary to establish an apprenticeship system and to employ the whipping post, stocks, and hanging to make people work?"By the act of 1536," says Mr. Froude in his History of England, "the 'sturdy (able-bodied) vagabond' who by the earlier statute was condemned on his second offense to lose the whole or a part of his right ear, was condemned for the third offense to be executed as an enemy to the commonwealth." "A further excellent but severe enactment," continues Mr. Froude, "empowered the parish officers to take up all idle children above the age of 5 and 'appoint them to masters of husbandry or other craft or labor to be taught,' and if such child ran away, he might be publicly whipped with rods."1 "This educative theory," Mr. Froude says, "was simple but effective, for the first condition of a worthy life is the ability to maintain it in independence," and though "varieties o' inapplicable knowledge may be good, they are not essential." Under such a régime it might be supposed that vagabonds would have soon disappeared centuries before any variety of inapplicable knowledge was taught to the peasantry of England; but such was not the case, for after some forty years of this species of effective education it was necessary to pass the statute of 1576, the preamble of which has been quoted above, and in 1601 the famous statute out of which, says Dr. Burn, the historian of the "poor laws," "have come more litigation and a greater amount of revenue, with consequences more extensive and more serious in their aspect than ever were identified with any other act of Parliament or system of legislation whatever." The first Tudor set property to supporting the Government, the last set property to pauperizing the poor, though intending to make them industrious. THE PREVENTION OF THE EDUCATION OF YOUTH IN CRIME. The bad policy of confining children arrested for some trivial offense with the criminals of a common prison early caused separate establishments to be created for juvenile offenders." These establishments are variously called houses of refuge, reformatories, and industrial schools, and there are one or more of them for each sex in most of the States. In 1890 there were 14,846 inmates in these institutions, one-fifth of whom were girls. In 1880 the inmates were 11,468, or 229 persons in every 1,000,000 inhabitants, to 237 persons in the year 1890. Far the larger number of these 15,000 boys or girls are not criminals; many of them are vicious, but very many more are victims of an environment neither created nor improvable by any exertions of theirs. To these the State holds out a helping hand, and every decade sees an improvement in the methods and character of its management. To children who have done no illegal act, but have neither parents nor friends, a thousand orphan asylums open their doors. THE REFORMATION OF THE CRIMINAL. In America, if not in the world, the earliest efforts to free the slave and reform the criminal were made by the Quakers of Pennsylvania. They were the first abolitionists, when abolition was opposed to their business interests; and they devisel a scheme for reforming the criminal that was so terribly effective in theory as frequently in operation to unsettle the mind of the patient or drive him to selfdestruction. Their system of prison régime was known to French and English investigators as the solitary-confinement plan, according to which reflection was only broken by religious instruction. But this early and successful effort to add a crowning terror to crime has long since passed out of existence, and during the 1 Froude's History (of the Tudors) of England. Vol. 1, pp. 59, 88, and in fact the whole chapter. last ten years another system, unique in its philosophy and social in its mechanism, has been introduced. This innovation is the Elmira plan, in which the household economy of the prison and the physical, moral, and intellectual instruction are conducted on a regenerative method. Into such prison it is even ventured to introduce the word honor, and prisoners are regularly dismissed on parole when they have learned a trade or are capable of taking care of themselves in a legitimate manner. In these ways has society endeavored mercifully to exterminate crime as a business; that is to say, to exterminate the hardened or habitual criminal. Against those, however, who are recalcitrant to such treatment energetic measures are being taken, and all that has been wanting to effect the object contemplated by those measures is a method of identifying the confirmed criminal. THE BERTILLON SYSTEM OF ANTHROPOMETRICAL MEASUREMENTS. The habitual criminal who successfully practices his vocation is characterized by two mental qualities-egotism and cunning. He looks upon himself as an educated man in the sense that Mr. Froude, the historian, uses the word "education," and probably disdains every "variety of inapplicable knowledge." He considers his professional adventures as in no way differing from any other business, except that his requires courage; and he receives complacently the homage of his fellows and the admiration of the crowd that fears the law which he despises. It requires some ability to apprehend an artist of this description, enterprising not only as an individual marauder, but still more formidable as a teacher of his specialty. At first the idea was to "set a thief to catch a thief," and then police agents were expected to "impregnate their visual memory with the cast of the criminal's countenance," for the eye sees in things only what it looks at in them and it looks only at that of which the idea is already present in the mind." But both of these methods have drawbacks. Judges and juries are averse to paying off the "old scores" of one person against another, and are aware that the eye may see in things what is not there. Photography was thought capable of obviating this difficulty, but the collection of criminal portraits has become so large that it is a physical impossibility to discover the portrait of a recaptured criminal unless he kindly tells the name he bore when the portrait was taken. Thus, because it was impossible to identify an arrested person with his past, and punish him accordingly, justice has been baffled and roguery nourished. The use of anthropometry as a method of identification, says M. Bertillon, chief of the central bureau of identification of France since 1882, rests upon the three following data, which the experience of the ten years last past has shown to be unimpeachable, to wit: 1. The almost absolute immutability of the human frame after the twentieth year of age. The height only, or to be more exact, the thigh bone, often continues to grow for two or three years longer, but so little that it is easy to make allowance for it. Experience shows that this small increase is more than compensated for by the curving of the vertebral column (indicated on the descriptive card of the criminal by curve), which, commencing about the twentieth year, continues to accentuate itself by degrees until old age. 2. The extreme diversity of dimension which the human skeleton presents when compared in different subjects. This occurs to such an extent that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find two individuals whose bony structure is, we 1 This is quoted from M. Bertillon's preface to bis book published in America as The Bertillon System of Identification, the Werner Company, edited by Maj. R. W. McClaughry. 2 Major McClaughry's translation is used in these quotations. This translation is exhaustive, and is richly illustrated, mostly by photogravures, with the view of defining terms used in describing the genetic peculiarities of the human face and head. will not say exactly identical, but even sufficiently alike to make any confusion between them possible. 3. The facility and comparative precision with which certain dimensions of the skeleton may be measured in the living subject by means of calipers of very simple construction. And from among the innumerable measurements that it is possible to take of the human body, those to which we have, after minute criticism, given preference are as follows: (The instruments used and the manner of taking these measurements are shown in Note A of the appendix to this chapter.) a Now given place to width across face between cheek bones. But every card made is as cumbersome as a photograph, and the measurements, however scientifically made, are valueless for use unless classified. M. Bertillon reports his method to be as follows: During ten years 120,000 persons passed through the prisons of Paris, and their anthropometrical description (or signalment, as the French call it) were inscribed on as many slips of cardboard measuring 5.7 inches in length by 5.5 inches in width. These are assorted as they accumulate in this way: The cards for women (one-fifth of the whole) are placed by themselves; then the cards for male persons under 21 years of age are separated (one-tenth of the whole number of cards for that sex). The cards remaining (90,000) are first broken up into three divisions, according to the length of the head, to wit: First division, short lengths of head; second division, medium lengths of head; third division, long lengths of head. The meaning of the terms are rigorously defined by figures, but those figures are not an abstract definition of the terms short, medium, and long length of head, but they are fixed in such a way as to make one-third of the cards fall in each division. Thus the medium length of the Parisian police department has a range of only 6 mm. (185-190 mm.), while the long length includes all over 190 mm. and the short length all under 185 mm. This artificial interpretation of the terms long, medium, and short lengths has been adopted because experience has justified it. It must not be forgotten, however, that the measurements inscribed on the card are scientifically true, even though the cards be assorted into groups having arbitrary limits. Having divided the cards into three groups by the length of the head, each group is subdivided into three groups by the width of the head-narrow, medium, and broad widths. Thus three sets are subdivided into nine. Each of these nine groups is subdivided into three groups by the length of the middle finger-small, medium, large; each of these twenty-seven groups is subdivided on the length of the forearm; each of these groups into three by the height; these into classes of sixty by the little finger, and finally the color of the eye forms a group of twelve out of a total of 90,000 cards. The method of identification is obvious. A suspected person is arrested at Chicago. He denies everything, of course, and claims he is more sinned against by society than sinning. His anthropometric measurement is telegraphed, let us say, to Washington to a central bureau or library of the descriptions of criminals, at which all measurements have accumulated. The investigation proceeds from the identification of the length of the head to its width, from that to the length of the middle finger, from that to the foot, etc. Sometimes the measurement of the length of the head falls on the limit of a subdivision, then a double search is required, "exactly as one looks in two places for a word that one does not know the spelling of." In this double search resides, it is said, the only difficulty of identification; but the results obtained in ten years of practice in France have demonstrated that this obstacle is very easily overcome. There are, nevertheless, some objections to the accuracy of the measurements in the way of finding "the equation of personal error” of the obse. 7er, as is said in astronomy, or as M. Bertillon calls it, "maximum of tolerable deviation," that can not be discussed here, but are fully treated in M. Bertillon's work, of which there are two translations before the American public.1 At the prefecture of police the measurements are taken and classified by special employees. All the subjects arrested during the day are measured and identified, each new card being made in duplicate at one writing. The copy is immediately classified in the anthropometrical file, while the original card is classified alphabetically according to the orthography (or, more exactly, according to the pronunciation) of the proper name as declared by the prisoner. The card put in the anthropometric file is slightly shorter than the one placed in the alphabetic file, so as to prevent confusion. This alphabetic file is indispensable to discovering a criminal at large, for when the criminal's name is known, the alphabetic card contains a description of any peculiar marks upon his person, which, it is unnecessary to say, are not ascertainable except when the name of the suspected person is the same as given by him when his card was made. A singular feature of the operation of the Parisian system is that it has caused a marked decrease in the number of "international thieves" of the pickpocket class. It was the rule, says Bertillon, for individuals of this class to give a new name on each arrest, but recognizing the impossibility of concealing their identity, they have admitted personally that they prefer to remain in foreign capitals. In 1885 there were 65 arrested; in 1886, 52; then 39, then 19, and finally, in 1890, 14. Indeed, this method is particularly valuable for the purpose of identifying foreign thieves, as among 15 French recidivists there will be only 1 giving a false name, while in the case of the foreigner 1 in 3 is the proportion. The probability of recognizing the criminal by the measurements, says M. Bertillon, is equivalent to certainty, as the statistics of Paris show. THE GRADUAL ADOPTION OF THE BERTILLON SYSTEM IN THE UNITED STATES. The Bertillon or "French" system of measuring persons convicted or arrested for crime, in order more surely to identify such persons (if rearrested) as habitual criminals or recidivists, has gone through three phases of development in the United States, as far as State legislatures have dealt with the subject. In the case of the State of Pennsylvania, for which a law was passed in 1889, the use of the Bertillon system in her State and local prisons was permitted, but neither required nor recommended (Note B). In the case of the State of Massachusetts, for which a law was passed in 1890, the use of the Bertillon system was required in her prisons, jails, and houses of correction (certain prisoners excepted), but she failed to establish a central bureau for the custody and classification of the cards containing the measurements (Note C). In the case of the State of New York, the law lately passed (Note D) has not only required the use of the Bertillon system in her State prisons, but has established the central bureau so necessary to the efficiency of that system. The management of each of the prisons of Illinois has introduced the system of M. Bertillon, as has also the management of 1 Respectively by Maj. R. W. McClaughry, late general superintendent of police, Chicago, and by Dr. Paul R. Brown, major and surgeon United States Army. From both of these gentlemen this Bureau has received the most courteous and valuable assistance in preparing matter for the honorable the Secretary of State, to be transmitted to the British Government. Major McClaughry has favored us with his translation, which has been used. |