Preindustrial cities made criminals permanently identifiable through bodily branding and mutilation.

Evidence

Punishment practices in many historic cities and in the broader societies of which they were a part, often made it difficult for a convicted criminal to escape his past. … Mutilations, of course, could result from circumstances not involving criminality or punishment. An individual without an arm or hand or whatever might have merely had an accident. Moral differences were more reliably expressed by branding, especially where certain brands were reserved for certain offenses (see, for example, Lacroix, 196 3 :417). With the appropriate symbol burned onto his forehead, the “culprit” was forever proclaimed as such to all who saw him. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 247

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s Lofland reading purpose: preindustrial strangers were decodable through visible somatic marks, in contrast to the modern anonymous stranger who must be categorized behaviorally.