Connecticut’s probation system expanded annually after 1903. Taylor’s report to Gov. Rollin Woodruff in 1908 indicated that forty-nine officers were at work in forty-five towns, with six positions unfilled. He lists the amount of fines and costs collected from probationers, the amount of wages collected and expended for families of probationers, the amount of salaries received by the officers, and their expenses as submitted. He also provides, for the first time, a “Table of Offenses” for the year 1907–8.46
Seventy-eight crimes are listed, including intoxication, which had the highest numbers by far, assaults, burglaries, forgeries, gambling, rape (only one case), truancy, vagrancy, and domestic crimes such as desertion and child neglect. The list also includes crimes such as spitting or riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, committing nuisances, evading a railroad fare, and keeping an unlicensed dog. The changes in the types of crimes being processed by the courts is a fascinating study in itself, but not one that can be traced in detail in this history. It is the first information we have of the crime problems faced in Connecticut at the beginning of the twentieth century.
PRISONER IDENTIFICATION
Several other issues dealt with by the CPA during their first thirty-five years of operation are worth noting. One was prisoner identification. There existed no way for one jail or prison, even in the same state, to know whether the men and women being held there had committed other crimes elsewhere or were using their own names when convicted. Communication between states and even cities was almost completely lacking. In 1887 the National Wardens’ Association had organized themselves within the National Prison Association around the need for a way to identify criminals who had already been in the various prison systems across the country. Their object of concern was a new method that had surfaced in Europe that same year, the Bertillon System of Criminal Identification.
Alphonse Bertillon was a French law enforcement officer who, in 1884, worked out an identification system called anthropometry. It was based on a combination of measurements of various body parts, individual markings such as birthmarks and tattoos, and personality characteristics. Bertillon is also credited with promoting crime scene photography before it was disturbed and the invention of a compound to preserve footprints. On the whole, however, it was Bertillon’s anthropometric system that caught the attention of wardens and other prison reformers in America. It was a topic of debate for the balance of the nineteenth century. Included among its supporters was Francis Wayland and John Taylor from the CPA; John Garvin, warden of Wethersfield State Prison; and Charles Dudley Warner, owner of the Hartford Daily Courant, among many others.
For a good portion of the prison reformers of the day, the Bertillon method had an unintended but chilling effect on society. It seemed to confirm the widespread and often voiced assumption that criminals constituted a separate group of society. By the 1880s the barely understood concepts of evolution were being freely used to enliven parlor conversations about why some people competed successfully within society and some failed.
Criminals, being among the most prominent failures, were logical contenders for a special compartment of society’s misfits. If they could be categorized and documented physically, it would further justify isolating them in jails and prisons. Joseph Nicholson, who was one of the NPA leaders (the superintendent of the Detroit House of Correction and president of the National Wardens’ Association in 1888), sought to put a positive interpretation on that ideology. In a comment to his fellow wardens, he said that anthropometry “will make identification as belonging to the crime-class secure and unfailing, which will have a deterrent effect, free from brutalizing practices.”47
Not much more than a decade had passed, however, before the actual practice of measuring the physiognomy of criminals was deemed badly flawed. The instruments used were not uniform, nor the measurements precise. The same measurements taken by different officers differed significantly, and the physical shape of the body of every person changed over time. Nevertheless, the concept of identifying offenders in some way that could be standardized and supplemented by photography had been established as an important criminal justice goal. It laid the foundation for the ready acceptance of a much more reliable method of identification: fingerprinting. The patterns of the ridges, loops and spirals at the end of each finger had been used since prehistoric times to identify the signers of documents, but no one had discovered how unique a set of fingerprints was when compared with those of any other person.
In the late nineteenth century the definitive quality of fingerprints over time was demonstrated. In 1897 Sir Edward Richard Henry solidified all the previous evidence into a feasible and easily used system for police work in identifying key suspects. By 1904 the New York State prison system, the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, and the Saint Louis Police Department had adopted the Henry system, and a year later a National Bureau of Criminal Identification was established as a fingerprint repository.
HEREDITY AS A SOURCE OF CRIME
Another minor theme, with major implications, of the era also grew out of the surge of scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century. It was the debate over the role of heredity as a source of crime. In addition to the biological theories of Charles Darwin, various schools of psychology were already well established by the end of the nineteenth century. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, William James, and a host of other formative leaders were exploring the significance of consciousness, debating the existence of the soul and freedom of the will, and beginning the modern examination of the brain.
Drawing on that academic matrix of studies in psychology, the subject of heredity was a major point of discussion among penologists. Cesare Lombroso’s work in Italy to fix criminality as an alternative aspect of human nature was very well known in America, and his theories were discussed frequently in the Proceedings of the National Prison Association. The concept of biological determinism was pushed hard by Lombroso, based on the idea that criminals’ destiny was determined by their failure to evolve as most of humanity had done.
Evolution, it was widely believed, produced humans with consciousness and a free will to make choices, which were then passed on through heredity to their progeny. Farmers and botanists already knew that crossbreeding of animals and plants could enhance or remove certain characteristics. In the late 1850s an Augustinian friar named Gregor Mendel had focused his research on clarifying the basic concepts of heredity to explain how those changes actually took place in a sheep, a rose, or a vegetable. Experimenting with peas, he developed a number of rules that by the early 1860s became known as the laws of Mendelian heredity.
It was only a matter of time before other scientists explored the role heredity played in human development and only a step from there to the study of the possibility of inherited criminality. The idea that some took to crime not by choice but because they were born to be antisocial and prone to criminality was exceeding attractive, especially to those who supported a punitive approach to crime. Those with inherited character flaws would not easily be changeable, if at all. Those able to make better choices constituted the majority in society. They might become accidental criminals but were open to reformation because their inherited character foundation was sound.
Charles Dudley Warner, speaking at the 1886 meeting of the NPA, voiced the cautious approach of the Connecticut delegation to the new sciences in this regard: “Is the science of heredity sufficiently understood for us to base legislation upon it? … I believe in heredity … but I do not think we know enough … to make it the basis of legislation…. I look to measures more in harmony with our Christian civilization.48 He apparently spoke for the CPA leadership. No tendency to advocate for solutions to crime based on heredity, or to interpret crime in terms of heredity, ever appeared in the agency’s annual reports.
MIGRATION AND CRIME
A second less visible but important debate was precipitated by the increasing mobility of the American population. At issue was how to control and how to assess the dangers in the multitudes of people now moving about in the nation between