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Will West, William West, and the Usefulness of Fingerprints - Neatorama

In the 1880s, French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon introduced the standardized mug shot as a way to identify criminals. This was accompanied by his thorough system of measurements of the person, from height to the width of a foot. In 1903, the clerk at Leavenworth prison logged in a new inmate named Will West. Checking the records, he found that Leavenworth already had an inmate named William West who'd been there for two years. His mugshot (at the bottom in the image above) looked a lot like