Advocates for Risk: The Rise of the Criminal Record in the United States, 1900-1940

• In Event: Stigma and Labor Market Disconnection: Criminal-Record-Based Risk Control, Its Effects on Employment Opportunity, and Efforts to Overcome Related Workforce Disconnection

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of systematic criminal record collection in the United States. I suggest that the rise of the criminal record as both a legitimate bureaucratic mechanism and as a tool for predictive risk control was rooted in overlapping crises in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s. In this environment, new fields of professionals advocated novel solutions to the apparent failure of traditional criminal law and social control. I suggest that the criminal record served as a point of unity among various diverse fields of crime and security professionals, each with different diagnoses of the underlying drivers of criminality. Using textual and historical analysis, I identify several themes in developing discourse around criminal records in the first half of the 20th Century: the need to professionalize policing; the underdevelopment of U.S. social control and police science relative to Europe; the decisive role of 'career criminals' in driving U.S. crime rates; criminality as a mental disease; and the individualization of punishment. Finally, I examine some ways that increased popularity and legitimacy of criminal records for criminal justice use may have easily translated into increased private use of criminal records characteristic of the present-day U.S. employment regime.

Author

• Charles Brackett, University of Massachusetts Boston