Hostname: page-component-669899f699-7xsfk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-24T20:55:59.043Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Facing Your Criminal Record: Expungement and the Collateral Problem of Wrongfully Represented Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Amy Myrick
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While substantial sociolegal research has analyzed the deleterious effects of criminal records on life outcomes, little has examined the records themselves, or their relationship to the people they represent. In this article I take a novel tact, treating criminal records as the material, textual documentations of an individual's past. I then observe expungement seekers—people who encounter their own records—to understand their reactions. From this data, I use inductive theories of symbolic interactionism to theorize another collateral effect of the criminal record: it represents people in ways that depersonalize their social identities, and prevents them from communicating corrective self-understandings to the governing bodies that author the records. I conclude with my main theoretical contribution: “having a criminal record,” literally, means having a textual proxy that the state has authored on its own terms, without input from the people whom it permanently represents, and while concealing from those people the apparatus behind authorship. As a consequence, the criminal records system serves as a barrier to reciprocal communication between ex-arrestees and a legal system that represents them in ways that they may want to contest. This “wrongful representation” is a collateral effect of having a criminal record that impedes the ability of ex-arrestees to manage or repair their relationship with the state that has punished them.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 73 - 104
Copyright
© 2013 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

The author thanks Wendy Espeland, Laura Beth Nielsen, and other faculty and student members of the Northwestern University Sociology Department; the American Bar Foundation Graduate Writing Group; and the anonymous reviewers who were exceptionally helpful. The author presented an earlier version at the 2012 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting in Honolulu and benefitted from comments. She received funding from a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

References

Cahill, Spencer E. (1998) “Toward A Sociology of the Person,” 16 Sociological Theory 131–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callero, Peter L. (2003) “The Sociology of the Self,” 29 Annual Rev. of Sociology 115–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cerulo, Karen A. (1997) “Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions,” 23 Annual Rev. of Sociology 385–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooley, Charles Horton (1983) Human Nature and the Social Order. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.Google Scholar
Deflem, Mathieu (2008) Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond. Bingley: Emerald/JAI.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ericson, Richard V., & Haggerty, Kevin D. (2006) The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Ewick, Patricia, & Silbey, Susan (2003) “Narrating Social Structure Stories of Resistance to Legal Authority,” 108 American J. of Sociology 1328–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ewick, Patricia, & Silbey, Susan S. (1998) The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fine, Gary A. (1993) “The Sad Demise, Mysterious Disappearance, and Glorious Triumph of Symbolic Interactionism,” 19 Annual Rev. of Sociology 61–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1978) The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1995) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel, & Gordon, Colin (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Hassocks: Harvester Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1959) Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books: [Distributed by Peter Smith].Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1961a) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1961b) Encounters, Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1963) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1971) Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1981) Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Holzer, Harry J., Raphael, Steven, & Stoll, Michael A. (2006) “Perceived Criminality, Criminal Background Checks, and the Racial Hiring Practices of Employers,” 49 J. of Law & Economics 451–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenness, Valerie, Smith, David A., & Stepan-Norris, Judith (2007) “Taking a Look at Surveillance Studies,” 36 Contemporary Sociology: A J. of Rev. vii–viii.Google Scholar
Link, Bruce G., & Phelan, Jo C. (2001) “Conceptualizing Stigma,” 27 Annual Rev. of Sociology 363–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyon, David (2007) Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity.Google Scholar
Marshall, Anna-Maria (2006) “Communities and Culture: Enriching Legal Consciousness and Legal Culture,” 31 Law & Social Inquiry 229–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCann, Michael, & March, Tracey (1995) “Law and Everyday Forms of Resistance: A Socio-Political Assessment,” 15 Studies in Law, Politics and Society 207–36.Google Scholar
Mead, George Herbert, & Morris, Charles W. (1934) Mind, Self & Society from the Standpoint of A Social Behaviorist. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle (1995) “Resistance and the Cultural Power of Law,” 29 Law & Society Rev. 11–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nielsen, Laura Beth (2000) “Situating Legal Consciousness: Experiences and Attitudes of Ordinary Citizens about Law and Street Harassment,” 34 Law & Society Rev. 1055–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nielsen, Laura Beth (2004) License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Orbuch, Terri L. (1997) “People's Accounts Count: The Sociology of Accounts,” 23 Annual Rev. of Sociology 455–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pager, Devah (2003) “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” 108 American J. of Sociology 937–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pager, Devah (2007) Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in An Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pattillo, Mary E., Weiman, David F., & Western, Bruce (2004) Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Raphael, Steven (2011) “Incarceration and Prisoner Reentry in the United States,” 635 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 192–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sarat, Austin (1990) “ ‘… The Law Is All Over’: Power, Resistance, and the Legal Consciousness of the Welfare Poor,” 2 Yale J. of Law and Humanities 343–79.Google Scholar
Sauder, Michael (2005) “Symbols and Contexts: An Interactionist Approach to the Study of Social Status,” 46 The Sociological Q. 279–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silbey, Susan S. (2005) “After Legal Consciousness,” 1 Annual Rev. of Law and Social Science 323–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Somers, Margaret R. (1994) “The Narrative Constitution of Identity—A Relational and Network Approach,” 23 Theory and Society 605–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stryker, Sheldon, & Burke, Peter J. (2000) “The Past, Present, and Future of An Identity Theory,” 63 Social Psychology Q. 284–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charles (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Uggen, Christopher, Manza, Jeff, & Thompson, Melissa (2006) “Citizenship, Democracy, and the Civic Reintegration of Criminal Offenders,” 605 The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 281–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Western, Bruce (2006) Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage.Google Scholar
Western, Bruce, & Pettit, Becky (2005) “Black-White Wage Inequality, Employment Rates, and Incarceration,” 111 American J. of Sociology 553–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar