The (mostly) sordid history of the mug shot

Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Much to the public's glee, former President Donald Trump's mug shot is in circulation.

Fulton County, Ga., Sheriff Pat Labat promised it, saying when Trump would surrender, he'd follow "normal practices, and so it doesn't matter your status. We'll have mug shots ready for you."

The purpose of the mug shot isn't equality, and it isn't even identification anymore. Mug shots are a modern fetish in this country, and the way people are reacting to these arrests proves it. The public and police love them because they're pornography to those of us who want to feel morally superior.

Before the standardized picture, law enforcement used various methods to document defendants and suspects like artists' sketches and written descriptions. These methods were subjective and often ineffective. Once photography came along, police took pictures. In the 1880s, Parisian police adopted Alphonse Bertillon's system of anthropometry, which involved taking precise measurements of various body parts to augment the data collected with the photo.

A mug shot's utility has dwindled over time. The larger a collection of suspects — sometimes called a "rogue's gallery" — becomes, the more difficult it is to apply to a population. It's like a large game of memory — the more cards you have to turn, the less a match is likely. Eventually, measurements taken were reduced to just height and weight. But it wasn't just the statistics that changed; the mug shot's meaning evolved and not in a good way.

Criminologist Cesare Lombroso wanted to shift the study of crime from the mind to that of the body. Lombroso and his colleagues Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo started the modern, or positivist, school of criminology and wanted to identify an anthropological criminal type. Under their school, crime was something that certain bodies were predisposed to; criminal behavior was atavistic. And criminality could be read from a number of signs: tattoos, head and bodily characteristics, facial features. The mug shot wasn't a memorialization. It was a prediction.

And a harmful one at that. The National Socialist German Workers' Party — led by none other than Adolf Hitler — embraced Lombroso's theory to blame Jews as innately criminal and therefore in need of incapacitation, if not death. Criminology has since moved away from this line of thinking, but surveillance of the body is a theme in the current criminal legal system.

The mug shot's history aside, the public seems unusually excited at Trump's fourth criminal case in as many months. People bet on his expression in the picture. Neal Katyal, a former acting U.S. Solicitor General, told MSNBC's "Deadline: White House": "I'm really glad to see Georgia say [to Trump] … 'You're gonna be treated like everyone else.'"

These pictures are almost universally unflattering shots, and the ugliness is part of the design. There are no touch-ups or retakes, unless the photo doesn't resemble the person.

When the Detroit Free Press sued the Department of Justice in 2014 to have access to mug shots, the DOJ — a producer of procedural smut itself as the department that oversees the U.S. Marshals Service that processes people charged with federal crimes — argued that defendants have a privacy right to these pics because they're so unflattering. It admitted that a mug shot "conveys that the person may be embarrassed, humiliated, in shock, unwashed, unshaven and generally unpresentable." Reviewing some of the celebrity mug shots out there shows the DOJ lawyers were correct.

Because it impugns both character and appearance, the mug shot might be worse than the underlying charge. An indelible celluloid record of one's worst moment isn't on too many people's bucket list. But as the furor over Trump's arrests shows, mug shots are so bad that being spared one is considered preferential treatment.

Even the recent discussion about the availability of mug shots online shows how much worse the picture is than the actual criminal case. Some news outlets decline to publish them anymore but still report arrests and convictions. States are loath to expunge actual criminal records but seem to agree that the mug shot needs to go when it comes to public viewing.

And make no mistake — people relish sharing mug shots. Broadcaster Mehdi Hasan tweeted: "I suspect Donald Trump's mug shot tomorrow will instantly become one of the most-shared images in the history of the internet."

There's a reason why sharing the frontal and side-view photos of someone charged with a crime satisfies people. Just by looking at these images, the lay public becomes almost deputized into law enforcement. Rachel Hall, a professor of communications at Syracuse University, calls this phenomenon the "vigilante viewer." Casting eyes on the criminal image turns the underlying proceedings into a spectator sport, one that people enjoy witnessing viscerally.

This isn't to say that good reasons for mug shots don't exist; they do. With so many Michael Smiths in the world, a pictorial record can help separate people and protect the innocent. And, indeed, some people are proud of their mug shots. The late U.S. Rep. John Lewis tweeted his mug shot to educate people. To some, it's a badge of honor.

But to most, these photos are little more than salacious spectacle, one that does little other than make people outside the frame feel better about themselves.

Chandra Bozelko is a columnist at the National Memo. This article was distributed by the Chicago Tribune.