[“Fingerprinting was pioneered on women arrested for prostitution for a few reasons. First, there were many of them, so the police had a large pool upon which to experiment. Additionally, previous anthropometric techniques of tracking criminals (what were known as Bertillon measurements) had been developed on men, and they didn’t work well on women. Most importantly, however, women who were repeatedly arrested for prostitution were considered naturally criminal—like “perverts,” or drunks, or vagrants, or “born tireds.” As their deviant bodies supposedly led them to commit crimes, it made sense to track those bodies themselves.
Thus a stunning perversion of justice was accomplished: recidivism became a stand-in for being born bad. Judges began to base sentencing not on the crimes in front of them but on a biologically based assumption of inherent criminality—the “proof” of which was a previous history of arrests. That recidivism might indicate a failure in the system, or that the arrested individual might be experiencing persistent poverty, societal persecution, racism, misogyny, etc. did not seem to occur to the rich, white, straight men who made the system.
This leads to the final reason fingerprinting was pioneered on arrested prostitutes: they were considered fundamentally disposable, and if it turned out that fingerprinting did not work for identification, “the consequences of an error in a prostitution case was not all that dire.”Unless, of course, you were the arrested person. Soon, fingerprinting would be expanded to other disposable classes of feminine people, particularly abortionists and men arrested for homosexuality. Only after it had been thoroughly tested on these groups would fingerprinting be expanded to common procedure.
Fingerprinting put women like Mabel Hampton at a unique disadvantage: unlike men, they couldn’t give a fake name to avoid outstanding warrants or hide previous arrests. Unsurprisingly, the Fingerprint Bureau found that during the 1920s “the problem of the female offender [grew] increasingly difficult.” In the Department of Correction annual report for 1929, they speculated this was caused by “the comparative emancipation of woman, her greater participation in commercial and political affairs and the tendency toward greater sexual freedom.” Or, they acknowledged later in the report, “the figures may merely represent an increased activity on the part of the police.”]
hugh ryan, the women’s house of detention: a queer history of a forgotten prison, 2022
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