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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Amy Myrick
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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.

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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.

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