Book review: Punishment and Citizenship: A Theory of Criminal Disenfranchisement
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02645505221116460a |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Lageson shows how people harmed by digital punishment make choices about how
to mitigate, undo, or simply manage the harms of these commodified records. She
shows how disengagement from the internet is as much a strategy to deal with the
harms of digital punishment as overt resistance is. Similarly, for states and corporate
actors, Lageson shows the importance of choices made and of passivity in allowing
this business model to thrive and harms to persist
The focus here may be specifically American, but Digital Punishment shares
terrain with other recent works on power, society, and technology –such as
Tyler’s (2021) Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality or Zuboff’s (2019) The Age of
Surveillance Capitalism. It is a book which will be useful to anyone researching,
teaching, or studying topics such as criminal records, CJS bureaucracy, data-driven
justice, and of course stigma. Lageson demonstrates convincingly how the datafica-
tion of criminal justice has served to extend punishment via a business model of sur-
veillance, shaming, and stigma.
References
Garland D (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Tyler I (2021) Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality. London: Zed Books.
Zuboff S (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.
Punishment and Citizenship: A Theory
of Criminal Disenfranchisement
Milena Tripkovic
Oxford University Press, 2019.Pp. 192
ISBN: 9780190848620
Reviewed by: Cormac Behan,
Technological University Dublin, Ireland
Prisoner disenfranchisement remains one of the few contested electoral issues in
modern democracies. It is at the intersection of punishment and representation.
With many jurisdictions divided on whether prisoners should be allowed access
to the franchise, Milena Tripkovic brings us on a journey from ancient Greece
and Rome to 21
st
Century democracies, to remind us that the franchise, and who
should be excluded (or included) is an issue that politicians, jurists, scholars, and phi-
losophers have debated for millennia. Demonstrating an impressive command of her
subject, Tripkovic engages with a range of literature from the legal theory,
Book reviews 393
To continue reading
Request your trial