Jenn Juarez

Forensic Science
CJ 1350-003
9/23/2017
ALPHONSE BERTILLON

Alphonse Bertillon was born on April 23, 1853 in Paris, France and then passed away on
February 13, 1914 in Mnsterlingen, Switzerland. One of two children of; Louis Bertillon, a well-
known French statistician and physician and Zoe Bertillon. As time went on, Alphonse was not
performing as expected in his academic study, as well has having many health issues such as
constant migraines and nose bleeds. Alphonses shyness lack of well-established expression did
not help him either. His father later sent him to Great Britain, having Alphonse learn everything
he lacked in, hoping that would aid Alphonse. Once he returned to France, Alphonse was enrolled
into the army. Alphonse also developed his fathers intellect and an interest in anthropology and
statistics like his father.
Around the year 1879, once his service to the army had concluded, he obtained a clerks
job, a minor one of that, at the Paris Prefecture of Police. One of his assignments was to put
characterizations and traits of different criminals each day and copy them on small cards. He later
became aware of how the characterizations and traits were incredibly like everyone elses,
making it hard to completely identify different criminals. And it also wasnt an uncommon factor
that offender would give out fake names so that the possibility of having a significantly reduced
sentence than they would have initially had if they had been honest in the first place, making
their system, at the time, completely obsolete. Making the job incredibly boring. Realizing how
redundant copying information onto a card when, essentially, a lot of people were prone to
repeating a prior committed crime as well. Alphonse also had a bit of an addictive love for
organization and order prompted him develop a methodical organizational tactic that would be
combined with photography and systematic measurement, which would really impact how law
enforcement and forensics is conducted to our modern-day life.
He speculated that if the chance of two people sharing the same measurements was four
to one, adding another measurement, it would diminish the chances to sixteen to one. Alphonse
figured that, for example, eleven measurements were added, chances that two people share the
same exact measurements would have been 4,191,304 to one. Alphonse wrote a report around
mid-August in 1879 to his chief of police in the Paris Prefecture of Police, Chief Louis Andrieux,
proposing a new system that would be a lot more detail oriented but would help with the
organizational issues that the department of police was having. Admittedly, Louis was a newbie,
the only reason he even got the position was because of nepotism and political influence.
Andrieux wasnt entirely educated to appreciate the effort that Bertillon was putting in. Initially,
Andrieux completely ignored Bertillon, but Bertillon persisted and would continue to measure
arrested people and would visit the jail to measure prisoners as well. October 1879, Bertillon
turned in another report to the chief of police, adding his method of how he would classify and
file all the information Bertillon was wanting to utilize. The method in which he was using was
that he would separate the measurements in three main groupsthe small, medium, and large.
As Jack Fisher put it in his findings
This would place a measurement set, generally, into one of eighty-one groups.
So, if a filing cabinet with eighty-one drawers, contained a total of 81,000 offender
cards, each drawer, or subgroup, would hold roughly one-thousand measurement
sets, a fairly manageable number. Bertillon had defined large, medium and small
arbitrarily to ensure that the eighty-one subgroups would be equally balanced.
Within each of the eighty-one drawers, the measurement cards would be further
arranged chronologically according to the specific measurements of the individual
body parts. Bertillon was confident that it would only take a few minutes to check
the file to see if the arrestee just measured had been processed before.
Chief Andrieux admittedly, wasnt really into Bertillons persistence. At the same time, he
wasnt sure what to make of it. The Chief sent the proposal that Bertillon was working on, to
Gustave Mace. Though Gustaves intelligence had helped him resolve many high-profile cases,
he was, in his mind, realistic. He wasnt willing to risk failure based on pure theories, he want
concrete facts that it would work. Because of that, Gustave told the Chief to ignore it. Even
though Andrieux took Gustaves opinion with great consideration, he still called for Bertillon.
Telling him that though his ambition was admirable, they were unrealistic.
In 1883, the Parisian police adapted Bertillons signaletics or bertillonage anthropometric
system; that way Bertillon could classify people by measuring peoples heads, bodies, and
analyzing the formation of eyes, eyebrows, mouth, ears, etc., and point out unique characteristics
such as scars and tattoos. Then all that information could be transferred into a card, and all that
information was also made into a formula that was attributed to a lone person. The cards of
information were also accompanied by photograph of the face of the person and a profile figure,
thus creating the infamous term mug shot that has become such an important variable in our law
enforcement, forensics and corrections. Precisely in the year 1883, Bertillon created over 7,000
measurements of different people and determined 49 repetitive offenders. One year later, he
found over 200 more repetitive offenders.
Later named as Bertillonage, it eventually integrated a verbal description, body
measurements, and most importantly, fingerprints. Its some what of a common fact that
everyone has unique set of finger prints. Finger prints are so exclusive, that not even identical
twins, have the same finger prints. And Alphonse Bertillon was really the primary person to
believe in the advantage of fingerprints, mainly because it started to become so much more
reliable. In 1888, the Department of Judicial Identity was formed for the Paris Prefecture of Police
and Alphonse become the director of that department. Alphonse kept producing more methods,
such as improving the photographic techniques. Not much longer, around the beginning of the
new century, fingerprinting started to displace the Bertillon system.
Despite the disappearance of the use of the Bertillon, American Robert W. McCaughry
utilized Bertillonage in 1887 in the Illinois prison system. One year later, after becoming the chief
of the Chicago Police Department; Chicago become the first police department to familiarize the
Bertillon system in American law enforcement. McClaughry gave Sergeant Michael P. Evan
supervisor status of the Bertillon bureau, which would later form to become the departments
rogues gallery. In 1903, now in a federal penitentiary as a warden at Leavenworth, Kansas,
McClaughry stubbornly persisted the application of fingerprints as an improved procedure in
classifying prisoners.
If it wasnt for Alphonse Bertillon, law enforcement, especially in the United States, would
still struggle to continue classifying and separating suspects and inmates. Its become so
important that not only does our country have an exponentially huge system known as the
automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS), solely dedicated to finding and inserting
information on fingerprints alone. Alphonse also helped create mug shots, which has become
important in identifying suspects and prisoners but still knowing theres still unique
characteristics that law enforcement and forensics can still utilize when need be. All that also
helps law enforcement and forensics organize their information and reports without losing
themselves in the mountains of reports that must be completed no matter what. Alphonse
Bertillon made quite the impact with both forensics and law enforcement.
 Works Cited
"Alphonse Bertillon." Encyclopedia of World Biography. . Encyclopedia.com. 23 Sep. 2017
<http://www.encyclopedia.com>.
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Encyclopdia Britannica, Inc., 22 Oct. 2013. Web.
Editors of National Institutes of Health. "Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body: Galleries:
Biographies: Alphonse Bertillon (18531914)." U.S. National Library of Medicine.
National Institutes of Health, 05 June 2014. Web.
Fisher, Jim. "ALPHONSE BERTILLON: THE FATHER OF CRIMINAL IDENTIFICATION." Forensic
Science. Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, 2006. Web.
Law Enforcement Museum. "Bertillon System of Criminal Identification." Bertillon System of
Criminal Identification. Law Enforcement Museum, 2011. Web.
ScienceMuseum. "Science Museum. Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine."
Alphonse Bertillon. ScienceMuseum, 2003. Web.