Sarah Esther Lageson, Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice
| Author | Megan Comfort |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211027272 |
| Published date | 01 October 2022 |
| Date | 01 October 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Sarah Esther Lageson, Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of
Data-Driven Criminal Justice, Oxford University Press: New York, 2020;
242 pp. (including index). ISBN: 9780190872007, $34.95 (hbk)
Sarah Esther Lageson’sDigital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of
Data-Driven Criminal Justice is a deeply illuminating, profoundly important, and
urgently communicated book drawing on years of empirical study and case law research
to excavate the murky and maddening labyrinth of online criminal records. Lageson
expertly demonstrates that the proliferation and commodification of technology-driven
recordkeeping has exponentially expanded the ways in which people can be shamed, sur-
veilled, punished, and financially and emotionally devastated. As usual in American life,
the majority of people targeted for these abuses are Black and brown, and do not have the
requisite forms of political, social or economic capital to inoculate them from the poten-
tially dire ramifications of an encounter with the police and its sequelae. In the tradition of
Michael Tonry’s (1995) treatment in his classic book Malign Neglect of the “tough on
crime”policies of the 1980s and 90 s, Digital Punishment lays bare the inherently
racist and fundamentally unethical practices of capturing, selling, publicizing, and priori-
tizing information generated by an astonishingly convoluted and egregiously damaging
system.
The first part of Digital Punishment explores the production and dissemination of
digital records documenting police stops, court hearings, community supervision or
incarceration sentences, and other forms of contact with the criminal legal system.
Lageson deftly leads readers through the thicket of disjointed practices, overworked gov-
ernment employees, public databases, private brokers, barely regulated markets, fervent
“digilantes,”and exploitative profiteers that generate, commodify, and broadcast these
data. We learn why rhetoric about the importance of transparency has superseded
rights to privacy, how errors with life-altering consequences are routinely introduced
and reproduced by staff who are undertrained for and relatively unconcerned with data
management, and that harvesting, repackaging, and selling public records in the name
of “safety”is big business. Lageson carefully unpacks and explains these phenomena,
pulling back the curtain to reveal that the information funneled into background
checks, mugshot websites, and neighborhood-watch groups is arguably messier, more
invasive, and more unjust than the system that produced it.
The second part of the book turns to those harmed by these processes, nearly 150 of
whom reviewed their criminal records with Lageson during interviews and allowed her to
compare them with additional records across multiple sources. We meet people such as
William, fruitlessly attempting to correct a rap sheet that inexplicably lists an arrest in
1901 along with two decades of charges and convictions he knows nothing about, erro-
neously imported into his file from that of someone with the same name. There is
Jameison, whose juvenile records were publicly disclosed instead of being sealed as
ordered by the state; Jaci, who was mortified to hear from friends that she appeared on
Mugshots.com after a domestic dispute with her boyfriend; and Gladys, whose
decades-old misdemeanor conviction was discovered online by her fellow church
748 Punishment & Society 24(4)
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