The man intrigues me. His is the face of paradox. It bears the expression of deep intelligence or the stone-cold gaze of a brute.

The mouth is drawn in a frown or a sneer. The set of the lips is at once morose and belligerent. The hair is wild and unwashed, but the mustache is neatly groomed. It looks as though he may have been crying, although it may be only the intensity of his rage.

Criminal mugs are both revealing and enigmatic. Laid bare before the eye of the camera, a suspect has no choice but to stare and wait for the flash of the bulb. An entire life – the childhood, the adolescence, the entire history that brought them here – is captured forever in that fraction of a second.

Some smile with a cocky air. Others let their features sag in sad, tired resign. They glare into the lens and let their faces tell a thousand stories.

In my collection of mugs is a large man with a round face and dark eyes. There are bruises, but his expression does not reveal pain. That’s because he has been captured in mug shots many times before. This time, he stands accused of keeping lewd photographs of young children.

This is the end of the line for this suspect. Not just a prison cell but a place where other inmates know your crimes and despise you for them. This man died behind bars. I’ll bet his final expression was not so different from his mug shot. In the police photo, it looks like he has already predicted his fate and accepted it.

Flip to the next mug and here is a woman who has the lines of the very tired creeping like spider legs across her face. She is young and yet she looks ancient. The years have not been kind to her and she knows it. The hair is dull and uninspired. The skin is pale and unadorned.

She has been caught lifting a safe from a downtown bar and she might do serious time for this. Her eyes stare out forlornly, as if asking the world to give her one more chance, but expecting no kindness.

Here is a boy who looks like he might scream. Only he is not a boy at all, but a young man with an astounding rap sheet. Drug deals, burglaries, thefts and other forms of mischief. Those crimes pile up high enough, you might be sent away for years.

It’s hard for a 20-year-old to accept such a fate and it shows in this photo. The young man is round and doughy. The eyes are wide and frightened. He appears to be on the verge of tears, and maybe there’s a snickering policeman behind the camera.

You can read all about the kid’s crimes in a news story, but all you really need to do is look at the photo. He can’t believe the federal prosecutors want him this time. He can’t believe he might spend a decade or longer in a cage. His momma will be heartbroken.

This next guy, well … You can just see the wear of hard living in his face. The eyes don’t seem to focus at all. The hair is long and wild, rivaled only by the unruly beard. Is that a smirk or just a feeble attempt to make the muscles of the face work under the duress of alcohol?

For every year of sane living, add 10 more for life on the streets. That is the face in this photo. If asked, you’d guess he was 60 or 65. He was barely 40 and now he’s dead.

I have dozens of mugs to look at but none transfixes me like the man with the pale green eyes. I met him nearly 20 years ago and he was the most fascinating man I ever met. Charming, witty and as smart as anyone you will meet. The ladies loved him. Men admired him and he should have been the star of a dozen blockbuster movies.

But he has not been able to lay off the booze or cocaine. He runs with a tough crowd and wrestles with a haunted past.

The last I heard, he attacked another man with a hand tool in a downtown scrap. I haven’t talked to him since, but the eyes staring out from the mug shot tell me the story. It was just another criminal event in a long line of them. The eyes say, “The hell with it.” Back to the dungeon we go.

Tragic and defiant, sad and dangerous. One man staring from a police photo with a thousand stories to tell. But only that fraction of a second to tell his tale with a perplexing stare – sneer or frown or grimace? – and the hypnotizing eyes of a jungle cat.