In 1887, Warden R.W. McClaughry of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet (now Joliet Correctional Center) introduced a radical new idea. To keep track of recidivist offenders and identify ...

Bertillon System of Identification authorized by the city commissioners. Terror to criminals. They take no chance of arrest where it is in vogue – urged by the ...

In the first decades after the invention of photography, police forces began assembling “rogues galleries,” collections of images of suspected and convicted criminals. These galleries were rarely ...

French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon's (left) techniques for identifying criminals in the late 19th century set the template that police use today. (Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images) For more ...

Well, maybe the title wouldn’t have been catchy enough for a TV show. But the Los Angeles Police Department’s adoption of the Bertillon system in 1898 began a short, colorful chapter in the struggle ...

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French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon believed each person's physical measurements were as distinct as their fingerprints, and devised the first modern mug shots as part of his classification system ...