Book review: Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma and the harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice
| Author | Will Paterson-Bassett |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02645505221116460 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews
Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma
and the harms of Data-Driven
Criminal Justice
Sarah Esther Lageson
New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Pp. 256
ISBN-13: 9780190872007
Reviewed by: Will Paterson-Bassett,
University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
In Digital Punishment Sarah Esther Lageson has produced a highly readable and
timely analysis of ‘digital punishment’. Over the course of the book, Lageson
makes plain the operation and everyday impacts of this emerging domain of punish-
ment, as part of a wider trend of penal entrepreneurialism, with enviable clarity and
detail. Drawing from extensive field work and research across the United States,
Lageson explains how policing and criminal justice in the United States have facili-
tated the rise of for-profit businesses that scrape, collate and host criminal record
information, most famously the ‘mugshot’. The result is that snapshots of people’s
lives are entirely stripped of context and made highly accessible to a wider public
such that these formal state records are repurposed as: objects of entertainment,
resources for informal background checks, and opportunities for extortion of the vul-
nerable by corporations. With nearly a third of Americans (p. 28) holding some
form of criminal record –including unfounded arrests and charges that are
dropped before trial –these harms are not only serious for individuals, but serious
in scale, as years old mugshots found via brief internet searches affect the
housing, work, and credit someone can access.
Book reviews The Journal of Communit
y
and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
2022, Vol. 69(3) 391–397
© The Author(s) 2022
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sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02645505221116460
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