ALTERING CRIMINAL FACES

Waipa Post, Volume 36, Issue 2146, 19 April 1928, Page 6

ALTERING CRIMINAL FACES

" Interest has lately been aroused in official circles, not so much in Great Britain as in America, by plastic surgery operations performed on criminals " (writes Kenneth C. Buttle in the Millgate Monthly). "In the early part of the year a criminal in San Quentin prison, San Francisco, announced his intention of going to run straight, but as his appearance was against him he could not obtain employment. He requested the warden of the prison to allow him to undergo surgical treatment, and, after some consideration, this was agreed to. Specialists re-built his broken nose with cartilage taken from his ' cauliflower * ear, and then a course of ' face-lifting ' was tried. The result was astonishing. He was unrecognised among his own intimate associates of the underworld, and when he revealed the miracle great activity prevailed, and ended in three other discharged criminals being treated in a similar manner. " Considerable prominence was given to this in the American press, which, at the same time, published an article which asserted that fingerprints could be altered, if not obliterated, by a surgical operation. Naturally, such being the case, the whole finger-print system of the world would be rendered unreliable, and, in time, useless in practice. It was said that the operation was performed by cutting away the topmost layer of skin and uniting the fresh so that the concentric lines recorded differently. It is utterly impossible to alter fingerprints in this way. Finger-prints are formed on the inside of the finger, and not on the skin. The nerves of the finger hold a secretion which is forced through glands or ducts into the skin. To alter finger-prints, then, it would be necessary to cut away the root of the finger, including the sweat-glands; and, of course, if this were done, the secretion would not flow, and the fingers would be useless. We now see that operations on the fingers are useless to the criminal in avoiding detection by the finger-print method, which he obviously dreads. Therefore, unless a malefactor is prepared to have his fingers amputated, he can never be unidentified by his fingerprints."