COLE, Simon A.

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Princeton University, A.B. (with honors), 1989; Cornell University, Ph.D., 1998.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Criminology, Law and Society School of Social Ecology, 2357 Social Ecology II, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-7050. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Department of Science and Technology Studies, instructor, 1995; City University of New York, Borough of Manhattan Community College, adjunct lecturer, 1997; Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research, postdoctoral fellow, 1997-1999; Visual Networks, Inc., Rockville, MD, visualization architect, 2000; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, instructor at the Kennedy School of Government; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Department of Science and Technology Studies, consultant, 2001; City University of New York, New York, NY, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, visiting scientist, 2001-2002; University of California, Irvine, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, School of Social Ecology, assistant professor, 2002—.

WRITINGS:

Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2001.

Contributor of scholarly articles to Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Science in Context, Social Studies of Science, and Social Text.

Book chapters and encyclopedia entries contributed to Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement, Sage, 2004; The Encyclopedia of New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, forthcoming; Advances in Automatic Fingerprint Recognition, edited by Nalini K. Ratha and Ruud M. Bolle, Springer-Verlag, forthcoming; and The Technology of Justice: The Use of DNA in the Criminal Justice System, edited by David Lazer, MIT Press, forthcoming.

Contributor of commentary, book reviews, and magazine articles to International Criminal Review, Lychnos, Punishment & Society, New York Archives, New York Capital Defense Bulletin, New York Times Magazine, and Lingua Franca.

Peer reviewer for Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology & Human Values, and American Historical Review.

Cole's work has been translated into Korean and Turkish.

SIDELIGHTS:

Simon A. Cole's decade of academic work studying the historical and sociological connections between science, technology, law, and criminal justice has made him one of the preeminent experts for insight on criminal identification. However, his questions about the infallibility of fingerprinting and other means of identification have not always made him popular with law-enforcement officials.

In 2001 Cole published Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification, a look at the history of fingerprinting and other methods of criminal identification. The book traces fingerprinting back to British-ruled India and its initial role there and in the United States in keeping track of migrating workers. Cole asserts that fingerprint identification has achieved "an imposing veneer of scientific and legal authority" but that authority is about to be undermined due to many cases of fraud, false positives, and fabrications. Cole later turns his attention, and his scientific skepticism, to today's DNA typing, as it begins to replace fingerprinting in law enforcement.

A Kirkus Reviews critic embraced the book's sociological and forensic insights, "Like all good history, this thoroughly researched and documented account offers lessons for today." Jim Burns, writing for the Library Journal, summed up Suspect Identities as "a fascinating bit of social history but rough going for the lay reader in its technical discussions." Publishers Weekly appreciated Cole's "rigorous detail and attention to historical ambiguities," and Gilbert Taylor of Booklist described the book's approach as "more clinical and less anecdotal" than other popular forensic works.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 1, 2001, Gilbert Taylor, review of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification, p. 1432.

Economist, December 16, 2000, review of Suspect Identities.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2001, review of Suspect Identities, p. 376.

Library Journal, April 15, 2001, Jim Burns, review of Suspect Identities, p. 116.

Publishers Weekly, April 9, 2001, review of Suspect Identities, p. 59.

ONLINE

Simon A. Cole, School of Social Economy, University of California Irvine,http://www.seweb.com/ (September 6, 2003), author's biography and curriculum vitae.*