According to the article “Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification,” fingerprint records determine who gets what kind of punishment. Fingerprints are used to resolve cases of mistaken identity and to give names to those individuals who have passed away unidentified. Our fingerprints serve as a unique identifier. Fingerprints have proven to be a significant tool due to their persistence and uniqueness. That is to say, fingerprints are considered to be persistent because they do not change over time and unique because no two individuals have the same fingerprints. Even identical twins have been proven to have distinctive fingerprints. Latent, patent and plastic are the three types of fingerprints that can be found. Latent fingerprints are made up of sweat and oil on the skin’s surface and are invisible to the naked eye therefore, requiring additional processes to be seen. Patent fingerprints are visible to the naked eye and are made up of blood, grease, ink or dirt. After the fingerprint is collected then the analysis process begins. During this process examiners determine whether or not the print provides enough information to be used for identification. Class characteristics such as arches, loops and whorls are used to narrow down the print to a particular group. After completing the analysis examiners compare the unknown print to that of a known print. If there tends to be any unexplainable differences between the known and unknown fingerprints the examiner can then make the decision to exclude the known fingerprint as the source. After such evaluation the entire process is repeated independently by a second examiner. In order for the fingerprint to be aptly identified both examiners conclusions must match.
Article below:
http://www.crimemuseum.org/library/forensics/fingerprints.html
I always found it very interesting how fingerprinting works, but this overview cleared up alot of the questions that I’ve had in the past. Initially I believed fingerprinting wasn’t a clear indication of the indentity of one invididual, how can some high-tech machine be able to tell exactly who I am based on the ridges of the finger? I still believe that fingerprinting was first invented for regulation, the government can do a lot with only your fingerprints. During the 19th century, fingerprinting would’ve solved the many problems regarding the recidivists , but because technology wasn’t developed then, narrowing down one’s fingerprint to a person who already committed the same crime once would be near impossible. In the article that we reviewed today regarding the failed capture of serial crime committers, it spoke about the use of a survey questionnaire in which authorities would fill out a form asking several unique questions about captured criminals in hopes of finding a repeat offender. This method failed because it took too much time to find one criminal this way as narrowing down and matching a captured criminal to a specific description was almost impossible. Fingerprinting would have inherited the same problems as authorities would have to look through an immense amount of finger pictures in hopes of finding one that matches the criminal they caught. Because many of these original theories failed back then hasn’t stopped authorities from expanding on the ideas associated with those same theories. Now that technology has exploded there are a plethora of ways for repeat criminals and criminals in general to be stopped dead in their tracks.
For more information I suggest anyone who’s viewing this response to read the post that I wrote…
Travis Shillingford
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2004-08-06-wonderquest_x.htm
I don’t know what April Holladay’s qualifications are, she may be an unreliable source, but one of the questions she answers in her column deals with finger prints. She says that a cut on the upper layer of skin, the epidermis, would not affect the pattern on the finger. However an injury that reaches to the lower layer of skin may change the fingerprint pattern. She names one gangster who had a surgery to change his prints but doesn’t mention any other way that the bottom layer of skin could be changed.
When I looked a little further into changing fingerprints an article from Scientific American reported a man actually LOSING his fingerprints from chemotherapy! One of the doctor’s that they interviewed even said that any rash or disease that breaks down skin, like poison ivy, could cause a person’s finger prints to change IF the person didn’t leave the rash to heal.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lose-your-fingerprints
So I guess, it is possible to change your fingerprints if you really want to go through all the trouble of repetitively picking poison ivy scabs or paying for surgery.
Fingerprints are one of the only things that make a person different from everyone else. Courts use them to identify criminals for all of their cases. People have been convicted just off a fingerprint and some have been set free. Copying a fingerprint is not easy, but it is possible especially because of today’s technology available to us. Because of this, many people are in jail, even though they are innocent, but you can’t prove it. The process of identifying a fingerprint is not always correct but most times it is. Only qualified people, those who are certified examiners are able to identify fingerprints. Fingerprints are necessary in today’s justice system to tell us who is guilty or not of a crime. No one wants to be in jail for something that they did not do. In an article from New York Times paper, it said “Fingerprints are more useful because they are easier to collect than DNA, forensic experts say. But critics say the profession of fingerprint analysis is not as rigorous as generally believed. On a 1995 proficiency test of 156 examiners conducted with the approval of the International Association of Identification, the profession’s certifying organization, one in five examiners made at least one ”false positive” identification — linking a mock crime-scene print to the wrong person. Fingerprint experts point out that the error rate was lower on subsequent tests.” Fingerprints are easy to make a mistake and especially with matching; court should not rely on fingerprints as evidence alone in cases to convict a person because of crime. They need more than a fingerprint to prove that person is guilty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/07/us/fingerprinting-s-reliability-draws-growing-court-challenges.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm