Sarah Esther Lageson, Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice

Abstract

Sarah Esther Lageson ’ s Digital 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 commodi fi cation of technology-driven recordkeeping has exponentially expanded the ways in which people can be shamed, sur-veilled, punished, and fi nancially 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 rami fi cations 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 fi rst 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 government employees, public databases, private brokers, barely regulated markets, fervent “ digilantes, ” and exploitative pro fi teers 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 We learn why rhetoric about the importance of transparency has superseded rights to privacy, how errors with life-altering consequences are routinely introduced and reproduced by staff who are undertrained for and relatively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