The Truth Machine (2 page)

The traditional polygraph measures skin conductance, breathing rate, and blood pressure. The subject also undergoes intense visual scrutiny.

Cleve Backster, a polygraph expert for the CIA, attempts to detect deception in a plant. Photo by Henry Groskinsky,
Life.com
images.

Between the 1935 Lindbergh “crime of the century” and the 1995 O.J. Simpson “trial of the century,” the notion of the lie detector became deeply embedded in the North American psyche. Despite constant criticism, satirical attacks, government prohibition, Papal condemnation, and a widespread suspicion that it “can be beaten,” the use of the lie detector persists. High-profile cases in which the participants took polygraph tests include cases involving Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, the spy Aldrich Ames, and the Oklahoma City and Atlanta Olympics bombings. Isuzu trucks, Pepsi Cola, and Snapple juice are some of the products that were advertised with the help of the “truth machine.” It appeared in countless movies and television shows. In one
Star Trek
episode, Captain Kirk made Scotty take a lie detector test to prove he was not a serial murderer of women. An episode of the 1990s hit TV cop show
Homicide
featured “the electro-magnetic neutron test” which, unknown to the suspect, issued photocopies of a palm print upon which the words “True” or “False” had been printed beforehand. Many such depictions, of course, portray lie detection as a rational and technical science by contrasting it with “pseudoscience.” But use of the machine has constantly transgressed the boundary that supposedly demarcates factual science from sheer fantasy.

The use of the lie detector to manage contradiction is a key theme of this book, one that previous histories have not highlighted. The principle ambition here is to investigate how the lie detector came to be constructed as a technology of truth.
¹⁰
Why do these machines continue to feature in the dreams of those responsible for maintaining law and order? Recent scholarship has detailed the biographies and motivations of the major actors in the historical drama.
¹¹
My aim is to push the story back in time into the obscure origins of criminology itself. What interests me is why and how the lie detector was finally “invented” in the United States, even though all the important technological innovations had been developed by European criminologists
prior to the start of the twentieth century. My argument is that the machine came about as the result of a sustained dialogue between science—in this case criminology—and the wider culture. Literary, newspaper, and movie depictions did not misinterpret, distort, or corrupt the concept of the lie detector; in fact they played a vital role in creating it.

There is a thieves' quarter, a devil's den, for these city Arabs.
There is their Alsatia; in the midst of foul air and filthy lairs they
associate and propagate a criminal population. They degenerate
into a set of demi-civilized savages, who in hordes prey upon
society … a race as fierce as those who followed Attila … These
communities of crime, we know, have no respect for the laws of
marriage—are regardless of the rules of consanguinity; and, only
connecting themselves with those of their own nature and habits,
they must beget a depraved and criminal class hereditarily
disposed to crime. Their moral disease comes
ab ovo.

—J. Bruce Thomson (1870)

For much of the last two millennia in the West, the Christian tradition considered the miscreant's deeds to be manifestations of universal sin. Human weaknesses such as depravity, temptation, lust, and avarice were regularly invoked to account for conduct that compromised the moral order. Criminality was explained by appealing to supernatural forces such as the actions of mischievous demons or the vagaries of fate. People in early modern England believed that God exposed and punished the crime of murder either through direct intervention or by acting through temporal agents.
¹
The supreme power of divine providence guaranteed that crimes of blood would be punished, despite the difficulties associated with detection and proof.

In 1591, a Kent coroner ordered the murderers of four children to call out their names, whereupon the victims' pale bodies, “white like unto soaked flesh laid in water, sodainly received their former coulour of bloude, and had such a lively countenance flushing in theyre faces, as if they had beene living creatures lying aslepe, which in deed blushed on the murtherers when they wanted grace to blush and bee ashamed of theyre owne wickednesse.”
²
In the 1650s, Lady Purbeck and a maidservant were both instructed to lay
their hands on the corpse of an infant discovered in a privy. The maidservant immediately confessed to the murder when the body started bleeding.
³
In 1725, London magistrates ordered that a human head found on the shore of the Thames at Westminster be placed on a pole in a nearby churchyard, directing church officials to arrest anyone “who might discover signs of guilt on the sight of it.”
⁴
Locals recognized the head as that of John Hayes, whose wife, the magistrates quickly discovered, had recently taken two lovers. Convicted of the murder, Catherine Hayes was subsequently burned alive. As these examples demonstrate, in the early modern period, corpse touching, cruentation rituals,
⁵
and violent public executions appeared to materialize divine intelligence; they produced confessions and acted as powerful deterrents against crime.

Such procedures were products of mental frameworks and ways of life very different from those of our own era.
⁶
Modern ideas about criminality originated in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Cesare Beccaria in Italy, Jeremy Bentham and John Howard in Britain, Benjamin Rush in America, and Paul Johann Anselm von Feurerbach in Bavaria pursued rational inquiries into the causes of crime and prison reform, pioneering a secular, modernist criminological discourse.
⁷
Rush's
The Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty
(1786) was one of the first scientific attempts to conceptualize crime and insanity in terms other than sin.
⁸
Bentham described his innovative model prison, “Panopticon” of 1785, as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” The ambition of what later became known as the “classical school” was that “government by rule” would replace “unregulated discretion,” in the words of one magistrate reformer.
⁹
Such beliefs were based on a rationalist conception of the calculating subject, a model of the individual whose “psychological” motivations were irrelevant to the administration of justice. Under this framework, research into the biological or environmental causes of crime would only undermine the liberal conviction that individuals were autonomous agents in full control of their own actions.
¹⁰

The general thrust of penal policy during the nineteenth century was humanist. The number of hangings declined in England from the 1830s, and by the 1860s all the traditional Georgian penalties had been abandoned, including the pillory and whipping post, the convict ship, and the public execution.
¹¹
Public violence was increasingly thought to pander to the lowest human instincts and militate against improving the conduct of the population. Punitive spectacles were gradually replaced by measured disciplinary
techniques. The prison was rejuvenated as a space for moral discipline, “a training ground for, and a social representation of, the overcoming of immediate impulses and passions and the reconstruction of character.”
¹²
Punishment strategies that had once broken the body transmuted into to those that promised to repair the mind. These reforms brought the hitherto indistinct image of the criminal into sharp focus.

At the start of the nineteenth century, the criminal had been little more than “a pale phantom, used to adjust the penalty determined by the judge for the crime.”
¹³
By its end he had eclipsed the crime and had become the focus of criminological discourse. A diverse array of intellectual, scientific, practical, social, and political developments combined to create an empirical discipline devoted to systematically analyzing the causes of criminality.
¹⁴
New theories of human nature conceptualized the mind as a natural entity, particularly in the wake of evolutionary theory.
¹⁵
The reconceptualization of human agency in the language of naturalism made it possible to think about criminality less in terms of moral failures of the will and more in terms of the mind's constitutional and environmental influences. Scientific explanation began to shift “from acts to contexts, from the conscious human actor to the surrounding circumstances.”
¹⁶
Geniuses, criminals, and the insane populated the new disciplines—the three types of exceptional people that had inaugurated the anthropological study of human beings in the late eighteenth century.
¹⁷
The “insane criminal genius”—that diabolical combination of all three foundational categories of the human sciences—inhabited the pages of learned journals and was thought to stalk the streets of the metropolis.

Another influence on the development of criminology was the emergence of statistics. Parliamentary committees charged with investigating rising crime rates required systematic numerical data about crime. The French government started publishing official crime figures in 1827. In Britain, the Statistical Department of the Board of Trade was founded in 1832, the Manchester Statistical Society the following year. In 1834 the Statistical Society of London began to use judicial statistics and census data to chart the distribution and demography of crime and to correlate crime rates with other social indices.
¹⁸
Conclusions about the complex causes of criminal conduct could be framed in a new way.
¹⁹
The Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet repeatedly cited crime rates as evidence for his claim “that free-will exercises itself within definite limits.”
²⁰
“Sad condition of the human species!” he exclaimed in 1835. “We are able to enumerate in advance how many individuals will stain their hands with the blood of their fellows, how many will be forgers,
how many prisoners, much like one can enumerate in advance the births and deaths that must take place.” Society contained within itself the seeds of all the crimes that were to be committed, he asserted, as well as the conditions necessary for their nurturance: “It is society that, in some way, prepares these crimes, and the criminal is only the instrument that executes them.”
²¹
Quetelet was not proposing a social account of crime. Under the influence of phrenology, the “reluctant determinist” statistician accepted that “unhealthy morality was manifest in biological defects and that those with such defects had high criminal propensities.”
²²
“I am far from concluding that man can do nothing for his amelioration,” he wrote in 1842. “He possesses a moral strength capable of modifying the laws which concern him.”
²³
Nevertheless, statistics revealed the relative stability and predictability of crime rates and also that age and gender were the two most significant factors determining a person's propensity for criminality.

Public health also contributed to criminology's development. Contemporary observers who noted the unprecedented growth of cities linked pathology with morality by deploying metaphors of disease, sewage, pollution, and contamination. An “avalanche of numbers”
²⁴
enumerated the slums and their inhabitants: the laboring classes, the idle, and the “incorrigibly lazy.” In 1856 the great Victorian urban investigator and social critic Henry Mayhew divided society into civilized citizens and nomadic vagabonds. His experiences interviewing beggars, street entertainers, market traders, and prostitutes led him to the “melancholy” conclusion “that there is a large class, so to speak, who belong to a criminal race, living in particular districts of society… . These people have bred, until at last you have persons who come into the world as criminals, and go out as criminals, and they know nothing else.”
²⁵
Mayhew claimed that society was composed of two races, “the wanderers and the settlers.” Among the former he counted pickpockets, beggars, prostitutes, street performers, sailors, and such like. This group was characterized by “a greater development of the animal than of the intellectual or moral nature of man … distinguished for their high cheek-bones and protruding jaws.”
²⁶
He considered this group's “habitual indisposition to labour” as the most important cause of crime.