‘The Early Criminal Record on the Boundary of Entertainment: Thomas F. Byrnes’ Professional Criminals of America and the Spectacle of Criminal Identification’ by Charles F Brackett in (2022) 20(2) Surveillance & Society 157-171 comments
While the proliferation of criminal records has received much recent attention, the origin of the criminal record in the United States itself is relatively obscure. This article examines an episode in the development of criminal record keeping and lateral surveillance in the United States, the publication and reception of Thomas F .Byrnes’ Professional Criminals of America ([1886] 1969). I argue that Professional Criminals of America developed a cultural purchase well beyond its relatively modest circulation. By exploiting anxieties about mobility, anonymity, and the decline of class distinction, Byrnes’ book sold itself as a tool to develop regimes of lateral surveillance, enlisting regular citizens to support the police by spying on one another.
Brackett argues
The proliferation of criminal records in the US and the resulting handicaps for people who have them are topics of increasing concern for scholars and policymakers (e.g., Lageson 2020; Jacobs 2015). While the stigma of a criminal record has been the subject of extensive study, scholars are only beginning to study the extensive use of records (e.g., Jacobs 2015; Lageson 2020; Thacher 2008). Meanwhile, the emergence of the criminal record in the United States has received almost no sustained study. Drawing on theories of surveillance technology as both practical and imaginary (Cole 2001; Bunn 2012), and testing theories of the emergence of “risk society” and lateral surveillance (e.g., Beck 1992; Andrejevic 2002), I examine Detective Thomas F. Byrnes’ 1886 book Professional Criminals of America ([1886] 1969). Specifically, Byrnes’ entertaining volume, which sold more than ten thousand copies in its first printing (Brooklyn Daily Eagle 1886), merged entertainment with new technologies of crime control and sought to produce a type of lateral surveillance. Byrnes used his own charisma and public fascination with criminality to turn Professional Criminals into a significant cultural object in the turn-of-the-century United States. In doing so, Byrnes ([1886] 1969) sought to introduce a tool that would provide any citizen the information they needed to be their own detective. …
Late-twentieth and twenty-first century scholarship on security and surveillance has emphasized the supposed emergence of “risk”as a dispositif for the management of diverse populations of people, events, or probabilities (e.g., Foucault 2008b; Bigo 2012). Since the 1980s, a growing body of surveillance and security literature has come to emphasize the role of disembodied data (e.g., Gandy 1983; Lyon, ed. 2003; Haggerty 2001; van Dijck 2014), algorithmic and predictive practices (Aradau and Blanke 2017, 2018), and the technologies of data-driven risk management in both security practices and governance more broadly (e.g., Lageson 2020; Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018).
Studies of risk often position the rise of risk as a de facto rupture in the social order (e.g., Beck 1992 and Giddens 1990). Briefly stated, risk society theories posit the emergence of a new social form governed less by traditional class conflict and competitive governance than by the technocratic assessment and management of various social risks (Giddens 1998). Or, as Beck(1992: 223) argues, “[p]olitics is no longer the only or even the central place where decisions are made on the management of the political future.” Perhaps the best example of this shift for criminal punishment can be found in Ericson and Haggerty’s (1997) argument that law enforcement’s main function today is the production of data.
A central aspect of this conceptualization of risk and risk management is the role of state institutions in the production of supposedly objective knowledge. In his study of criminal justice statistics, for example, Haggerty (2001: 191–192) argues that one of the main functions of statistical institutions is their claim to represent “objective rationality.” This formulation is substantively reproduced in multiple examinations of the risk society and the proliferation of risk management practices (e.g., Aradau and Blanke 2017). Challenges to the risk society formulation have tended to critique the claim of newness, both implicitly and explicitly (e.g., Rigakos and Hadden 2001). Others implicitly challenge Beck’s (1992) and Giddens’ (1998) claim to the declining salience and value of contentious politics, for example with a call reexamine the importance of “agonism” in democratic politics (e.g., Mouffe 2005; Wenman 2013).
Even critical scholars tend to take for granted that risk-based surveillance technologies are founded upon a logic of science and gain legitimacy from their patina of objectivity or rationality. This comes despite a rich trove of research that highlights the important role of spectacle in the growth and legitimization of surveillance. Several scholars have examined the interpenetration of spectacle with surveillance, either in legitimizing surveillance society (Gold and Revill 2003) or spectacular uses of surveillance itself (Kammerer 2012). Scholars including Loic Wacquant (2012), Barry Glassner (2000), and Jonathan Simon (2007) have examined the role of spectacular media coverage of crime and terrorism in legitimizing and expanding surveillance practices. Brucato (2015) has problematized the ideology of “objectivity”in police use of bodycams, while a long social-scientific tradition has focused on the role of charismatic authority (Weber [1919] 1947,[1922] 1946) in legitimacy, as well as problematizing objectivity as a social reality (e.g., Foucault 2013; Galison 2000).
How we understand the social management of risk and the resultant surveillant practices, then, has much to do with how we analyze the interaction of scientism and spectacle in the framing of both risk and its management. As much as a large insurance company may appreciate the multiplicity of statistics available to manage suspect populations and “dangerous” areas through Big Data, everyday citizens are more likely to frame their relationship to risk through lurid news coverage or the television show 24.
Further, while the risk society is consistently positioned as a development of Late Capitalism or Neo-Liberalism (e.g., Beck 1992), such a framing threatens to disappear the long history of risk. Scholars from across the political spectrum have pointed to risk’s role in creating capitalism itself, either celebrating (Bernstein 1998), analyzing (Foucault 2008a, or critiquing (Rigakos and Neocleous, eds. 2011) this relationship.
In examining Thomas Byrnes’ Professional Criminals of America ([1886] 1969), as well as its public reception, then, I seek to frame two basic questions at a micro-level. First, how did Byrnes’ work function as a melding of charisma and scientific authority, and what was its contribution to public acceptance of large-scale data collection?
