Perspective: For many Americans, getting arrested creates a record that can make them second-class citizens — whether they are convicted or not
While this is the first time a president has been indicted, it wasn’t the first time one has been fingerprinted — though Trump is the first to undergo this process as a defendant in the criminal legal system. His fingerprinting forced the former president to confront a stigmatized ritual, one that has long been used to cast suspicion on arrested Americans.
The increasingly sophisticated ability to identify arrested suspects prompted fierce debate over the state’s power to force them to submit to fingerprinting during the booking process. Plaintiffs in multiple lawsuits argued that fingerprinting was a coercive act that compelled a person to testify against themselves. Others contended that fingerprint records and mug shots should be destroyed following dismissals or not-guilty verdicts to prevent falsely labeling someone as a criminal.
As early as 1921, President Warren G. Harding voluntarily offered his fingerprints for registration with the International Association for Identification, and in 1933, the FBI opened a Civil Identification Section where Americans could submit their fingerprints to be stored separately from the criminal fingerprint files.
Federal relief agencies like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the New York City branch of the Works Progress Administration also began fingerprinting enrollees in the late 1930s. During the federal government’s Depression-era “war on crime,” arbitrary arrests of labor agitators and other criminalized populations generated fingerprint records that could jeopardize their access to jobs and other benefits for decades to come even if those arrests never led to a conviction.
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