The nineteenth century brought to light several studies and actions to fight against crime. They gave origin to criminology, a specific knowledge that led to judicial police, identificatory photography, the Bertillon identification system, crime records, legal medicine and crime literature. In Brazil the acquirement of knowledge about the "dangerous classes" was part of a political project conducted by statesmen aiming at the social control; in this scenario, the surveillance-correction function was undertaken by various institutions. In this paper we analyze the institution that gave rise to the systematization of the identificatory information - the Bureau of Identification and Statistics of Rio de Janeiro, currently Instituto Felix Pacheco. The analysis of the content of primary documents such as reports, photographs, identity cards, besides the literature produced on the subject reveals a criminal information system whose improvement over the years led to civil identification, embedded in the "informational intelligence".
