Although mug shots alone failed to provide a reliable system of criminal identification in the 19th century, some tried to find alternative uses of mug shot photography. 

One of the most salient examples of this was the 'science' of physiognomy. Physiognomy is the study of a person's physical characteristics - especially their face - to try and determine things about their personality. Although it was widely discredited during the 20th century, during the 18th and 19th centuries it was a legitimate and respected science. Many hoped that this study of faces could be used to pinpoint a 'criminal look' which could help police identify criminals - perhaps even before they committed a crime.

Physiognomy also had a direct link to the development and use of mug shots in the late 19th century. Sir Frances Galton (1822-1911), who is best known for his innovations in the science of fingerprinting, studied the potential of mug shots to reveal the ‘look’ of criminality. He layered mug shots of certain ‘types’ of criminals (such as smugglers, thieves, arsonists, etc.) into composite photographs. He hoped that by combining their faces, he would be able to identify facial features that indicated criminal tendencies.

Galton was the first to use mug shots in this way, but he wasn't the first to study the face to try and identify the 'criminal look'. For example, Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) was a Swiss poet and physiognomist who published Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beforderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe in 1775-78. In this popular book, he claimed that a person's facial characteristics reflected their 'temperament' or character (see image below).

Building on this idea, 19th century criminologists like Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) even identified some specific characteristics which might indicate criminal tendencies, such as:

• 'sugar loaf' shaped skulls
• pointy heads
• heavy jaws
• receding brows
• scanty beards

Lombroso claimed that criminality was inherited, and those who were 'born criminal' could be identified by these sorts of physical defects. Although it may seem like a laughable concept today, physiognomists thought that one day we would be able to look at a photograph of a person and be able to tell if they were a criminal, and even what types of crime they were capable of.

This idea that someone's physical look reflected their inner character and personality traits evolved out of another popular pseudo-science of the 18th and 19th centuries: phrenology. Phrenology is the study of the shape of the skull, based on the belief that its bumps correlate to parts of the brain. Phrenologists studied the faces and heads of people in order to try and reveal their behaviours and personality traits

In New Zealand, phrenologists even occasionally attended the executions of criminals in order to make plaster death masks. By studying the facial characteristics and skulls of these masks, experts hoped it would reveal insight into their criminal tendencies. For example, death masks of the notorious Burgess gang - Richard Burgess, Thomas Kelly and William Levy - were taken by a phrenologist named A. S. Hamilton at their executions in Nelson on 5 October 1866. Hamilton was allowed to study the men in prison before they were hanged, and to attend the executions.
Burgess was even interested in this process, requesting that the death mask be taken before his execution, in case his face was distorted after death.

Although the use of photography for criminal identification seemed so promising in the beginning, police all around the world soon realized that it had severe limitations. At the end of the nineteenth century mug shots were criticised for a number of reasons.

First of all, some people were concerned that mug shots and their association with criminality would taint the art and aesthetics of respectable portraiture. Because police often relied on commercial photographers to take mug shots of arrested criminals, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between a mug shot and a normal portrait (see image below). Those who could afford the expensive portraits worried that they might be mistaken for criminals. Furthermore, many worried that by using it for 'common purposes' like criminal portraits would rob photography of its 'art'.

Secondly, mug shots were criticized for their 'unscientific' process. Mug shots still relied on the subjective visual recognition of a criminal. Although this was certainly an improvement over written descriptions of suspects, many still desired a more reliable system which could identify criminals beyond the shadow of a doubt. To read about some of the methods that police developed to try and achieve this, see Beyond Mug Shots: Other Methods of Criminal Identification.

Finally, one of the biggest problems with mug shots lay in how to classify, organise, and sort through photographs. If the mug shots were organised by name and sorted into alphabetical order, it would be difficult to find the correct photograph if a suspect gave police a false name. Police and witnesses had to resort to flipping through mug shot books - a slow process which rarely resulted in a positive identification. By 1913, there were already over three thousand mug shots in New Zealand - a nearly impossible number of photographs to sort through. But this was nothing compared to larger places like London, where forty-three thousand mug shots were already collected by 1876.

Although mug shots have proved to be an invaluable tool for police in New Zealand and throughout the world, they were not the final solution to criminal identification that many had once hoped. New methods had to continue to be explored and incorporated into police work throughout the 20th century.

The New Zealand Police Force was officially established on 1 September 1886, and they began collecting photographs of prisoners that same year. 

These first photographs look a little different from modern mug shots. This is largely because there were no officially trained police photographers in New Zealand at the time. Instead, police relied on commercial photographers and amateur camera enthusiasts to take the mug shots. Because of this, the style of early mug shots in the collection of the New Zealand Police Museum vary greatly from photograph to photograph.

One common element in many mug shots, however, is the display of prisoners’ hands. In 1886, the introduction of fingerprinting in New Zealand was still nearly two decades away, so the inclusion of hands in mug shots provided an additional point of identification for police. Missing fingers, scars, and the general shape and condition of the prisoners' hands could all help in the identification of a suspect.

In 1903, Police Commissioner Walter Dinnie organised a comprehensive system of criminal registration for the New Zealand Police, in an attempt to modernise and professionalise policing in the country. His new system required photographs, handwriting samples, reports, associates, and operating habits to be collected from every criminal arrested in New Zealand. His son E. W. Dinnie, who had been trained in the United Kingdom in these modern methods of criminal identification, was named Finger-print Expert and Photographer. Throughout 1904, the young Dinnie worked closely with the New Zealand prison administration to refine the record keeping system, particularly the photographic files. This resulted in new, more elaborate criminal identification forms, which included a place for fingerprinting details.

From 1904 it became a standard police responsibility to take mug shots of all prisoners. A list of New Zealand policemen who owned cameras and/or were acquainted with photography was drawn up. In areas where there were no policemen available for taking mug shots, commercial photographers were still relied upon. The Policemen-photographers were paid for each photograph, or compensated by being exempted from night duty.

In April 1904, the Police Gazette (a monthly bulletin circulated to all police in New Zealand) also published its first mug shot- a photograph of wanted criminal John McKenzie, a convicted rapist who was wanted for the murder of his former employer.

In 1912 the Prisons Amendment Act officially sanctioned the use of mug shots, by declaring that all accused or convicted prisoners incarcerated for the first time had to submit to being photographed and fingerprinted, including by use of ‘reasonable force’ if necessary. By 1913 it was reported that over a thousand photographs of prisoners had been taken at Police Headquarters in Wellington, and approximately two thousand had been taken elsewhere in New Zealand.

When photography was invented in the first half of the 19th century, it seemed to be the solution to problems with criminal identification that police around the world had been waiting for. 

Finally, they did not have to rely on their memories and written descriptions of prisoners to recognise criminals.

As early as 1841 the French began making daguerreotypes of prisoners, but the earliest mug shot still in existence was taken by Belgian officials in 1843. Within the same decade, British Police also employed their first professional photographer. At first, photographs of criminals were mainly used as a tool to help familiarise regional police with vagrants who would move from place to place committing crimes. Soon, however, many prisons began systematically photographing incarcerated prisoners in order to supplement their written descriptions and help defeat the use of aliases. In 1854 Swiss authorities began circulating photographs of criminals to the public for the first time, pre-empting the 'Wanted' posters that were made famous in the American Wild West during the 1860s.

In 1858 the New York Police Department opened its first ‘rogues gallery’ to the public. Here, people were invited to look through galleries of mug shots in order to familiarise themselves with local criminals, and possibly help identify offenders. Rather than a practical aid to police, however, some scholars have criticised rogues galleries as merely a source of entertainment for Victorian voyeurs. Furthermore, they claim that mug shots at this time served to publicly humiliate and punish the offender more than as a practical means of recording information. Nonetheless, the trend caught on around the world, with galleries opening in Germany in 1864, Russia in 1867 and England in 1870. Soon, mug shots became a familiar type of image that was easily recognisable by almost everyone, and a standard aspect of police work.

Check out the Rogue’s Gallery of New Zealand Police Museum.

Rogue’s Gallery, New York Police Department. These collections of mug shots were open to the public in the late 19th century.

Today, there are many techniques which police use to identify criminals. 

Fingerprinting, photographs, and DNA are just some of the tools police can use to confirm the identity of someone they have arrested or to determine who is responsible for a crime. However, before these modern techniques were discovered, law enforcers had to rely on simpler methods of criminal identification, from basic face memorisation to brutal methods of permanently marking offenders.

Branding Joseph Relph in the Old Bailey, from “Criminal London: A Pictorial History from Medieval Times to 1939”, Mark Herber. Photo source

Branding

Branding the skin of criminals with a hot iron was an identification tactic which painfully marked individuals for life. Branding combined physical punishment, public humiliation and identification, and was used as early as 10,000 BC in Japan, by Ancient Greeks and Romans, throughout the Middle Ages, and even into the early modern period.

In Medieval England, for example, the Statute of Vagabonds issued in 1547 ordered that vagabonds, Gypsies, runaway slaves and brawlers to be branded on the chest, cheek or forehead. In London's central criminal court (known as the Old Bailey) 17th and 18th century criminals who were found guilty of manslaughter or pleaded 'benefit of the clergy' were branded on the thumb so they would not be able to receive the benefit again. (The 'benefit of the clergy' was the right of churches to punish their own members, so the criminal court had to hand the criminal over to church officials. Until 1779, criminals who received this benefit were branded on the thumb so they wouldn't be spared court punishment more than once.) This branding took place right in the courtroom, in front of spectators. Between 1699-1707 criminals were even branded on the cheek in an attempt to further deter future offenders.

Criminal branding in the Old Bailey ended after 1779, but the punishment was sometimes still practiced in the colonies or under special circumstances. For example, even as late as the 1860s deserters during the American Civil War were branded as a way to both punish and identify them.

Tattooing

The earliest recorded instance of using tattoos to mark criminals for the purposes of identification and punishment occurred in Japan in 720 AD. From that time, tattooing criminals became a common method of criminal identification in Japan. It even became the official punishment from 1720, replacing the amputation of the nose and ears. Criminals could be tattooed with rings around the arm or a character tattoo on the forehead. In one region, a line was tattooed on the forehead of criminals for each crime they committed, until the character for 'dog' was spelled out. This practice continued regularly until 1870, when it was abolished by the Emperor under the new Meiji government. Like branding, tattooing made criminals unemployable and turned them into social outcasts. In Japan, these tattooed outlaws often formed criminal gangs in order to survive. These gangs formed the roots of yakuza, the modern organized crime syndicate who are known for their elaborate tattoos.

Eugène-François Vidocq by Achille Deverie. Vidocq and his trained agents memorized the faces of thousands of Paris criminals in the early 19th century by visiting gaols and systematically watching prisoners as they walked in circles in the prison exercise yard.

Memorisation

Although methods of physically marking criminals existed, early law enforcers still relied most heavily on their powers of recognition for the identification of criminals. Before the 18th century this was a much easier task: communities were much smaller, and people rarely travelled beyond the places they were born. Police could often rely on simple visual recognition of the people in their community to identify an apprehended suspect.

During the Industrial Revolution, however, mass urbanisation occurred and massive cities quickly developed. With these new ‘societies of strangers’ simple recognition became a far less reliable process. In some areas, it became a standard police responsibility to memorise the faces of local criminals.

No law enforcement agent was more dedicated to this approach than Eugène-Francçois Vidocq, a French private detective in the early 19th century. Vidocq was a convicted criminal who became a successful secret agent for the Paris police, and later organized the first plainclothes unit of the Police in 1813. Often regarded as the first private detective and the father of modern criminology, Vidocq collected information on over 30,000 criminals and attempted to develop a system for the rapid identification and retrieval of criminal identities and information. The central component of his system relied on the systematic memorisation of thousands of criminal faces. To achieve this, Vidocq and his trained agents would make regular trips to prisons and carefully observe the prisoners as they walked in a circle in the exercise yard.

Written Descriptions

Police in large cities around the world also began keeping records of criminal names and descriptions of their appearances. For example, as early as 1797 Newgate Prison in New York began keeping comprehensive written descriptions of convicted criminals using a Convict Description docket to help standardise the descriptive terms used. In addition to their name, place of origin, date of birth, complexion, hair, stature and country, the register recorded distinctive features such as “high forehead”, “pockmarked”, or “red nose.” Systems like these, however, could easily be defeated by the use of an alias and was ineffective for criminals with commonly occurring names.

The Need for a Modern System of Criminal Identification

By the 1840s, barbaric practices of physically marking criminals had gone out of fashion. The modern approach to criminal punishment emphasised limiting a person's freedom rather than physically punishing their bodies. However as the population grew, criminal identification techniques like facial memorisation and written descriptions were becoming more and more inadequate, and the flaws in these outdated systems were increasingly criticised. This was partly to do with growing fears of recidivism - the repetition of criminal behaviour by an individual. With the development of criminal statistics in the first half of the century, criminologists realised that statistically most people who commit crime go on to re-offend. Furthermore, the majority of crime is committed by these habitual re-offenders. Because of this, prisons and other forms of criminal punishment were designed purposely to be harsh in order to deter future re-offenders, and laws were passed to punish recidivists more harshly than first time offenders. In the opinion of both law enforcers and the general public, an efficient modern system of criminal identification was needed to deal with this social problem.