Revisiting the Criminal Background Check in 20th-Century America

Criminal background checks (CBCs) have become an entrenched feature of life in the modern United States, where a wide array of companies, government agencies, and private individuals have access to Americans' criminal histories. Recent scholarship traces this meteoric rise in CBCs to the United States' turn toward mass incarceration and "get tough" politics during the 1970s, when new legislation authorized access to criminal records for a growing number of non-law enforcement purposes. (Jacobs, 2015)

This paper reframes the existing narrative by examining the deeper historical roots of CBCs within a global network of biometric projects during the twentieth century. Like other nations, lawmakers in the United States experimented with fingerprinting broad segments of the population for non-criminal purposes and even contemplated (but eventually rejected) universal fingerprinting legislation. (Krajewska, 2017) Scholars often depict the United States as a nation where political resistance confined fingerprinting to the criminal-legal and immigration system, in contrast to full-fledged "biometric states" like South Africa, where fingerprints became a broad technique of governance. (Breckenridge, 2016)

I argue that this narrative is only partially true. Although universal fingerprinting failed in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation nevertheless held over 110 million fingerprint cards in its Identification Division by midcentury, the overwhelming majority of which had been collected to perform CBCs. Using federal records and court cases challenging invasive uses of fingerprinting, I argue that non-criminal fingerprinting was not weak in the twentieth century United States, but merely mutated into a form that allowed its expansive law enforcement apparatus to justify waging a "war on crime" in ever-broader areas of American life. This perspective allows us to interpret widespread CBCs in the United States as a peculiar offshoot of a wider global biometric recordkeeping project, one which is currently growing into a multi-billion-dollar global industry.