The West Case: The Rise of Fingerprinting

Maybe it’s just me, but when I read a book set in a historical time, I delight in catching little nuggets of interesting facts. What caught me in The Other Side of Freedom, by Cynthia T. Toney, was the scene where they discussed the FBI starting a fingerprinting database. That plunged me down the rabbit hole of fingerprinting, which is pretty important to our justice system now-a-days. So with that, here’s a look at when fingerprinting changed everything.

Let me tell you the story of a man named William West. In 1903, William West was serving a life sentence for first-degree murder at the Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas.

Let me tell you another story of a man named Will West. In 1903, Will West arrived at the Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas for a minor crime. When Will arrived at the prison, the clerk was confused, thinking William must have been released and then committed another crime. The physical description of William West, along with his picture, was a close match for the man in front of him, who was Will West.

The common method of identification in 1903 was developed in 1882 by Alphonse Bertillion. He was a French anthropologist who came up with a measuring method to classify individuals. He measured things like forearm length, little finger, height, trunk, and ear length. These measurements were supposed to be unique to each individual, and so should have been a great way to keep track of criminals in the system. The US began using the Bertillion System throughout their prisons in 1887. And it worked great…until it didn’t.

In the case of William and Will, this proved to be a very confusing situation. What were the odds that two men in the same prison would look very similar, with close measurements, and even have the same name? It might have been a one in a million occurrence, but it still changed our whole justice system. After that, fingerprinting gradually replaced the Bertillion system.

Fingerprinting had been around since the late 1800’s, and is even featured in two of Mark Twain’s books (Life on the Mississippi and Pudd’nhead Wilson), but the challenge of it was how to catalogue and keep track of all those loops, arches, and whorls. As Ms. Toney says in The Other Side of Freedom, in 1924, the FBI took charge of keeping track of all those fingerprints. The ID division was formed on July 1, 1924, and they received over 800,000 fingerprint cards to process. And that was just the start.

In the case of Sal and his family, it led the authorities to figure out the crimes the mobsters had committed and helped put them behind bars. While fingerprinting isn’t perfect, like any system, it’s another tool, and another way that God shows His creativity in that no two individuals have the same prints.

And don’t forget, there’s still time to read, The Other Side of Freedom, and join the book club conversation. https://storytellersquad.com/groups/

Sal held out his hand, and Cranch turned it palm up. “See, each of your fingers has a unique pattern on its tip, different from anyone else’s. Copies of those fingerprints are left when someone touches something. Now there’s a way of finding and recording those patterns.”

Sal held his fingertips closer to his face. “Yeah, I see them.”

“The Bureau of Investigation in Washington started a fingerprint identification system last year. If these crooks have been involved in other crimes anywhere in the country and left fingerprints, we can match them up.”

–Cynthia T. Toney, The Other Side of Freedom