Book review: Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma and the harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice

Abstract

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 punishment, 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 facilitated 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 vulnerable 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 Community and Criminal Justice