- Overview
of issue and history of technology and criminal justice
- "Increasing demands on the criminal justice community
often out pace available resources. As a result, the criminal
justice community is implementing a wide variety of strategies-including
the use of technology to enhance effectiveness, productivity,
and officer safety.
 The criminal justice system in the United States
is decentralized. This decentralization offers many benefits,
but it also creates obstacles to achieving maximum efficiencies
and economies of scale in analyzing, designing, developing, and
procuring various technology products and services. Few criminal
justice agencies have the resources to keep abreast of the advances
in technology and to critically and objectively analyze and evaluate
the variety of technology products and services available to
assist them in their public safety activities. This decentralization
also impedes the sharing of critical information among the agencies."
-- Mitretek
- Historical
landmarks -- technology and criminal justice
"Those who do not study
history are doomed to repeat it" -- George Santayana
What lessons for the future use of technology in cj can we draw
from the past?
Selected highlights of criminal justice technology history (selected
largely due to relevance as antecedents of current technology):
- 1804: J. W. Ritter discovered
ultra-violet light, which is routinely used at crime scenes in
searching for body fluids
- 1807: Forensic Science Institute
established at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
- 1817: Eugène François
Vidocq formed the first Paris Police Detection Bureau
- 1850s Colt begins mass production
of first multi-shot pistol
- 1859: Photography used to demonstrate
evidence in a California case
- 1877: Albany police and fire
use telegraph.
- 1878: Telephone in D.C. precinct
houses.
1888: Alphonse Bertillon advances the anthropological identification
method to identify criminals (Chicago 1st city to adopt it).
Method later proven false
- 1893: Hans Gross, considered
the 'father of criminalistics', was an examining magistrate and
a professor of Penal Law at the University of Graz. In 1893 he
published Handbuch für Untersuchungsricter als System der
Kriminalistik, which was translated into English as Criminal
Investigation in 1907. Gross' work was based entirely on the
practical application of scientific techniques
A camera was rigged to capture a theft in a store.
- 1901 Scotland Yard adopts Sir
Edward Henry's fingerprint classification system
Later ones are generally extensions of Henry's.
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Issues in Criminal Justice and Technology