Private companies are profiting by posting people's mugshots online even though it can ruin their lives.

The early 21st century will be remembered by many images: Twitter avatars, Instagram pictures, and gifs are a few that quickly come to mind. But the mug shot is fast becoming one of the most relevant graphics of modern culture. Thanks to lenient public-records laws, a vengeful justice system, people's innate desire to laugh at others' misfortunes, and, most importantly, the internet, the nearly 200-year-old mug shot is having a major renaissance. And what that renaissance says about society is not good.

Philip Cabibi made a stupid mistake. Back in 2007, after hanging out in a bar and watching college football with some friends, Cabibi, who was 27 at the time, got in his car drunk and started driving home. When the cops pulled him over, Cabibi's blood alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit, and he was arrested and booked in Palm Harbor, Florida. Also like Yolina, Cabibi ultimately pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor and paid a fine, and he then lived for six months on probation. Four years later, during the kind of Google search we all do for ourselves from time to time, Cabibi found that on the first page of his results was his mug shot, which had been posted on the website florida.arrests.org.

Aghast, Cabibi hastily went searching for a way to get his picture off the site, which is how he came across "reputation management firm" RemoveSlander.com. RemoveSlander promised to get Cabibi's mug shot taken down within an hour, and all for a fee of just $399. Cabibi paid them, and his mug shot was indeed gone almost right away. But then reality set in.

"I realized it's just going to pop up on more sites, and more sites after that," he tells me. "I'm just glad American Express refunded my money."

Cabibi was the main case for a Wired story from late last year that detailed the cottage industry growing around mug shot websites. Mug shots have become easy for private citizens to obtain in states like Florida, Arizona, Texas, and others thanks to wide-open public-records laws. Animated by the desire to be transparent, police and sheriff's departments dump all their mug shots and the accompanying booking details into searchable databases. It's from those databases that enterprising citizens can use screen-scraping programs to expeditiously snag every new and old mug shot from a department's system, and then post them to their own sites. Even people who are never prosecuted or are proven innocent go into these databases. The result is an internet lousy with mug shot purveyors, from mugshots.com to mugshotsusa.com to bustedmugshots.com. In 2011, florida.arrests.org, where Cabibi found his picture, had more than 4 million mug shots in its collection, and it adds about 1,500 more each day.

A lot of these websites make money from ad revenue alone via Google AdSense banners, but, as Wired uncovered, some of the sites also work in cahoots with mug shot-removal services to boost profits. Florida.arrests.org, for instance, has given the people behind RemoveSlander.com a URL through which they can click a button and make a PayPal payment of $19.90. That nominal fee, which florida.arrests.org keeps for itself, disappears the mug shot from the site and eliminates it from Google's index, and RemoveSlander.com keeps the remainder of its $399 fee. To take down mug shots from three websites, RemoveSlander charges $699, and for six websites the price is $1,299. It's not a difficult process, but you wouldn't be able to tell it from those prices. The RemoveSlander website makes its work sound like the work requires top lawyers. Still, their catchphrase is effective: "Bail out of Google."

 Unfortunately, it's not just the straightforward moneymaking sites cashing in on the mug shot craze. Countless other mainstream organizations, from sheriff's departments to newspapers, have created outlets for average citizens to come and poke fun at their arrested peers. Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, domain of the controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio, posts all of its booking photos, and allows people to vote on a "Mugshot of the Day." The Tumblr blog Hot & Busted highlights the handsomest mug shots its readers can find—square jaws and boyish grins are juxtaposed with the men's charges. And then there's the proliferation of news sites that publish mug shot galleries: the Chicago Tribune does it, as does the Washington Post (though at least D.C. police won't release mug shots until after a criminal is convicted). But the most consistent mug shot newspaper gallery belongs to alt weekly the Miami New Times.

Danielle Dirks, assistant professor of sociology at Occidental College, is putting together a study based on interviews with men and women who have had their mug shots put on the internet. 

"This is the public stocks," she says. "This is shaming."

Dirks says what's probably most scary about the rise of mug shot websites and mug shot photo galleries is that nowadays one single crime can follow a person forever—even if they don't end up being charged or convicted of anything.

"This is part of punishment now," she says. "Your punishment doesn't end when you leave jail anymore. Now it will follow you forever and ever. It's not going to go away, which is why you see people scrambling so hard to try and pay services to scrub their pictures from the mug shot websites."

Dirks warns that in a country that leads the world in incarceration per capita—where people are arrested and thrown in jail for the most minor of nonviolent offenses—you'd be a fool to think that this couldn't happen to you one day. "You point and you laugh, but then you get a DUI and you can't believe how awful this system is," she says.
http://gizmodo.com/5949333/how-people-profit-from-your-online-mug-shot-and-ruin-your-life-forever