"Cole excavates the forgotten and hidden history of criminal identification--from photography to exotic anthropometric systems based on measuring body parts, from fingerprinting to DNA typing"--Jacket.

This study mainly focuses on the reciprocal relationship between language and identity in Chinese police-suspect investigative interviews. Based on the theory of interpersonal pragmatics, it makes a general micro analysis of discursive practices of both police officers and suspects and explores the multiple identities constructed in the interaction. Identities constructed by police officers and suspects are not necessarily consistent with their predetermined institutional roles. Police officers not only project and construct powerful identities, but also intentionally construct their less powerful interactional identities, such as helpers, interlocutors, and listeners. Suspects in the investigative interviews also build multifaceted identities, such as confessors, storytellers or justifiers. Various factors such as institutional settings, communicative objectives, interlocutors, epistemics and interpersonal relationships may exert influence on participants’ identity construction. Police officers and suspects may choose or adjust their expressions according to local interactional contexts. Their linguistic choice in the interaction will affect the establishment of interpersonal relationship between them and ultimately achieve construction of multiple identities.

Police interviewing is a critical part of the justice process, and more attention is now being paid to training in interview techniques. This new study uses tools drawn from interactional sociolinguistics and conversation analysis for a detailed study of some police questioning of adult suspects, and work undertaken in the training of police in interviewing children - in which quite different approaches seem to be adopted. Critical discourse analytic techniques are used in interpreting the outcome and the implications for training are explored.

Personal identification is very much a live political issue in Britain and this book looks at why this is the case, and why, paradoxically, the theft of identity has become ever more common as the means of identification have multiplied. Identifying the English looks not only at how criminals have been identified - branding, fingerprinting, DNA - but also at the identification of the individual with seals and signatures, of the citizen by means of passports and ID cards, and of the corpse. Beginning his history in the medieval period, Edward Higgs reveals how it was not the Industrial Revolution that brought the most radical changes in identification techniques, as many have assumed, but rather the changing nature of the State and commerce, and their relationship with citizens and customers. In the twentieth century the very different historical techniques have converged on the holding of information on databases, and increasingly on biometrics, and the multiplication of these external databases outside the control of individuals has continued to undermine personal identity security.

This title traces how the act of representing and watching is central to modern law enforcement. Finn analyzes the development of police photography in the 19th century to foreground a critique of three identification practices that are fundamental to current police work.

Presents a survey of literature, law, and psychology to examine the importance of identity.

"In this eye-opening critique, Ronald Kramer and James C. Oleson interrogate the promises of crime science and target our misplaced faith in technology as the solution to criminality. This book deconstructs crime science's most prominent manifestations--biological, actuarial, security, and environmental sciences. Rather than holding the technological keys to crime's resolution, crime sciences inscribe criminality on particular bodies and constitute a primary resource for the conceptualizations of crime that many societies take for granted. Crime science may strive to reduce crime, but in doing so, it reproduces power asymmetries, creates profit motives, undermines important legal concepts, instantiates questionable practices, and forces open new vistas of deviant activity"--