Crime

From the mid-to-late nineteenth century, in the period after the use of branding and before the use of fingerprinting, penal institutions faced the problem of how to identify repeat offenders. In this interim, Alphonse Bertillon, a clerk in the Paris Prefecture of Police, developed an anthropometric system that measured the bodies of criminals at their intake and catalogued these measurements in order to identify them should they offend again. Calculating Race’s second chapter traces the importation of the Bertillon System of Classification to the United States, where its data collection practices were racialized. It then investigates University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess’s 1920s work on this data set to build a formula for sentencing and parole decisions. The resulting algorithm from Burgess’s work relied heavily on race-based Bertillon data and factored race into its recommendations for length of sentence and supervised release, installing racial statistics as a key variable in matters of criminal justice.