Corrections_Today_Summer_2025_Vol.87_No.2

First published in Corrections Today magazine, July 1995

It encouraged prisons and prison systems to adopt the Bertillon system and petitioned the federal government to establish a National Bureau of Criminal Identification that would be based on the Bertillon system. At the turn of the century, wardens continued to express great faith in the Bertillon system. “I believe thoroughly in the Bertillon System,” declared Minne sota State Penitentiary Warden Henry Wolfert in 1901, “and believe that we shall derive much help from it.” But the Bertillon system’s days were numbered. A more dependable technology for inmate identification — fin gerprinting — was on the horizon. The fingerprinting method was developed by British anthropologist Sir Francis Galton in the 1880s, and a classification system for fingerprints was perfected in the 1890s. Well into the 1900s, many prisons and other law enforcement agencies used Bertillon measurements and fingerprints to supplement each other. In 1903, however, use of the Bertillon system began to decline rapidly, because its fallibility was demon strated vividly in the Will West/William West case. Will West was an inmate at the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) at Leavenworth who bore a strong facial resemblance to another inmate, whose name was William West. They were the same height, the same weight, and the same age. Most important, their Bertillon measurements were identical. Their fingerprints, of course, were quite different. The Bertillon system lingered for a few more years — it was even adopted for the first time in 1906 by the Virginia Penitentiary in Richmond — but the Will West/William West case and fingerprinting made the Bertillon system obsolete. Using prison uniforms to aid identification Attire further assisted staff in identifying inmates. Striped uniforms that — even from a distance — clearly identified a person as an inmate were still common at the beginning of the 20 th century, but in the decade before World War I, many prisons declared those uniforms humiliating and inhumane and abandoned them. Yet even as they moved away from stripes, prisons required

Article summary: 30 years ago, Corrections Today took a look at yesterday and tomorrow in this piece about the history of identi fication systems used in correctional facilities and a rather prescient look at future technologies correctional systems would adapt. Why this is still relevant today: Many of the challenges faced by cor rectional officers are the same today as they were a century or more ago. Learn ing how and why some practices evolved gives us insight into why things are they way they are now and allows us to make informed choices about technology going forward.

Evergreen wisdom:

“Even as they moved away from stripes, prisons required inmates to wear uniforms that would help staff recognize who they were.”

Background: Adobe Stock/Shariq.B; Microphone: Adobe Stock/Сергей Тарасюк; Card Catalog: Adobe Stock/Andrey Kuzmin

Summer 2025 | Corrections Today

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