Hostname: page-component-f554764f5-qhdkw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-20T17:57:02.274Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Crime Data, the Internet, and Free Speech: An Evolving Legal Consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Sarah Esther Lageson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Digitization and open access to governmental data have made criminal justice information incredibly easy to access and disseminate. This study asks how law should govern access to criminal histories on the Internet. Drawing upon interviews with crime website publishers and subjects who have appeared on websites, I use legal consciousness theory to show how social actors interpret, construct, and invoke law in a nascent and unregulated area. The analysis reveals how both parties construct legality in the absence of positive legal restrictions: Website publishers use legal justifications, while those appealing to have their online record cleared resort to personal pleas, as opposed to legal remedy. Ultimately, I show how current data practices reinforce structural inequalities already present in criminal justice institutions in a profoundly public manner, leaving website subjects with little recourse and an inescapable digital trail.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 8 - 41
Copyright
© 2017 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

References

References

Barbas, Samantha (2010) “The Death of the Public Disclosure Tort: A Historical Perspective,” 22 Yale J. of Law & the Humanities 171–215.Google Scholar
Beckett, Katherine & Sasson, Theodore (2000) The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Bernburg, Jon, & Krohn, Marvin (2003) “Labeling, Life Chances, and Adult Crime: The Direct and Indirect Effects of Official Intervention in Adolescence on Crime in Early Adulthood,” 41 Criminology 1287–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Best, Joel. (2012) Social Problems. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Black, Donald (1984) Toward a General Theory of Social Control. Volume 1: Fundamentals. Orlando: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Blackstone, Amy, Uggen, Christopher, & McLaughlin, Heather (2009) “Legal Consciousness and Responses to Sexual Harassment,” 43 Law & Society Rev. 631–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brame, Robert, et al. (2012) “Cumulative Prevalence of Arrest from Ages 8 to 23 in a National Sample,” 129 Pediatrics 21–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brame, Robert, et al. (2014) “Demographic Patterns of Cumulative Arrest Prevalence by Ages 18 and 23,” 60 Crime & Delinquency 471–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brayne, Sarah. (2014) “Surveillance and System Avoidance: Criminal Justice Contact and Institutional Attachment,” 79 American Sociological Rev. 367–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carey, Corinne A. (2004) “No Second Chance: People with Criminal Records Denied Access to Public Housing,” 36 University of Toronto Law Rev. 545–94.Google Scholar
Conley, Amanda, et al. (2012) “Sustaining Privacy and Open Justice in the Transition to Online Court Records: A Multidisciplinary Inquiry,” 71 Maryland Law Rev. 772–847.Google Scholar
Cooper, Davina (1995) “Local Government Legal Consciousness in the Shadow of Juridification,” 22 J. of Law and Society 506–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dowler, Ken (2003) “Media Consumption and Public Attitudes toward Crime and Justice: The Relationship Between Fear of Crime, Punititive Attitudes, and Perceived Police Effectiveness,” 10 J. of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 109–26.Google Scholar
Durkheim, Emile (1893) The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lauren B (1992) “Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Law,” 97 American J. of Sociology 1531–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, Lauren B., Uggen, Christopher, & Erlanger, Howard S. (1999) “The Endogeneity of Legal Regulation: Grievance Procedures as Rational Myth,” 105 American J. of Sociology 406–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellis, Justin (2011) How Public is Public Data? With Public Engines v. ReportSee, New Access Standards Could Emerge. NiemanLab 17 February. Available at: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/02/how-public-is-public-data-with-public-engines-v-reportsee-new-access-standards-could-emerge/ (accessed 26 January 2015).Google Scholar
Eschholz, Sarah, Chiricos, Ted, & Gertz, Marc (2003) “Television and Fear of Crime: Program Types, Audience Traits, and the Mediating Effect of Perceived Neighborhood Racial Composition,” 50 Social Problems 395-415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
European Commission (2014) Factsheet on the Right to be Forgotten Ruling (C-131/12). Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf (accessed 10 March 2015).Google Scholar
Ewick, Patricia, & Silbey, Sharon (1998) The Common Place of Law: Stories of Everyday Life. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Felstiner, William L.F., Abel, Richard L., & Sarat, Austin (1980) “The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming…,” 15 Law & Society Rev. 631–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galanter, Marc (1974) “Why the “Haves” Come out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change,” 9 Law & Society Rev. 95–160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilliam, Franklin D. Jr, & Iyengar, Shanto (2000) “Prime suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public,” 44 American J. of Political Science 560–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Alice (2014) On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greer, Chris, ed. (2010) Crime and Media: A Reader. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hochberg, Adam (2014) Disputes Over Crime Maps Highlight Challenge of Outsourcing Public Data, Poynter 24 November. Available at: http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/213443/disputes-over-crime-maps-highlight-challenge-of-outsourcing-public-data/ (accessed 26 January 2015).Google Scholar
Jacobs, James B (2015) The Eternal Criminal Record. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jewkes, Yvonne (2004) Media and Crime: A Critical Introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Katz, Jack. (1987) “What Makes Crime ‘News?” 9 Media, Culture & Society 47–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, Jack. (2016) “Culture Within and Culture about Crime: The Case of the “Rodney King Riots,” 12 Media, Culture & Society 233–251.Google Scholar
Klinenberg, Eric (2005) “Convergence: News Production in a Digital Age,” 597 The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 48–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lageson, Sarah Esther, & Uggen, Christopher (2013) “Crime, Punishment and Employment Over the Life Course.” in: Krohn, M. and Gibson, C., eds., Handbook of Life Course Criminology. New York, NY: Springer. 201–12.Google Scholar
Lageson, Sarah E., Vuolo, Mike, & Uggen, Christopher (2015) “Legal Ambiguity in Managerial Assessments of Criminal Records,” 40 Law and Social Inquiry 175–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lageson, Sarah E. (2016a) “Found Out and Opting Out: The Consequences of Online Criminal Records for Families,” 665 The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 127–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lageson, Sarah E. (2016b) “Digital Punishment's Tangled Web,” 15 Contexts 22–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Larson, Erik W. (2004) “Institutionalizing Legal Consciousness: Regulation and the Embedding of Market Participants in the Securities Industry in Ghana and Fiji,” 38 Law & Society Rev. 737–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lauer, Josh (2011) “Surveillance History and the History of New Media: An Evidential Paradigm,” 14 New Media & Society 566–82.Google Scholar
Lewis, Seth C. (2012) “The Tension Between Professional Control and Open Participation: Journalism and its Boundaries,” 15 Information, Communication & Society 836–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lincoln, Yvonna S., & Guba, Egon G. Naturalistic Inquiry. Newbury Park, CA/London: Sage Publications.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Logan, Wayne A., & Guthrie Ferguson, Andrew. (2016) “Policing Criminal Justice Data.” Minnesota Law Rev. (Forthcoming).Google Scholar
Marshall, Anna-Maria, & Barclay, Scott. (2003) “In their Own Words: How Ordinary People Construct the Legal World,” 28 Law & Social Inquiry 617–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maxwell, Jospeh A. (2013) Qualitative Research Design: An Interpretive Approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
McKenzie, Laura K. (2016) “The Right to Domain Silent: Rebalancing Tort Incentives to Keep Pace with Information Availability for Criminal Suspects and Arrestees,” 69 Vanderbilt Law Rev. 875–907.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. (1985) “Concepts of Law and Justice Among Working Class Americans,” 9 Legal Studies Forum 59–69.Google Scholar
National Consumer Law Center (2012) Broken Records: How Errors by Criminal Background Checking Companies Harm Workers and Businesses. Boston: National Consumer Law Center.Google Scholar
Laura Beth, Nielsen (2004) License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Pager, Devah (2007) Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potter, Gary W., & Kappeler, Victor E., eds. (2006) Constructing Crime: Perspectives on Making News and Social Problems, 2nd ed. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.Google Scholar
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (2008) “Police Records: A Reporter's State by State Access Guide to Law Enforcement Records.” Available online: http://www.rcfp.org/rcfp/orders/docs/POLICE.pdf (accessed 10 March 2015).Google Scholar
Rostron, Allen (2013) “The Mugshot Industry: Freedom of Speech, Rights of Publicity, and the Controversy Sparked by an Unusual New Type of Business,” 90 Washington University Law Rev. 1321–34.Google Scholar
Sampson, Robert J., & Jeglum Bartusch, Dawn (1998) “Legal Cynicism and (subcultural?) Tolerance of Deviance: The Neighborhood Context of Racial Differences,” Law & Society Rev. 777–804.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sampson, Robert J., & Morenoff, Jeffrey D. (2006) “Durable inequality.” in: S., Bowles, Durlauf, S. N., & Hoff, K., eds. Poverty Traps. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. 176–203.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, & Keams, Thomas R. (1995) Law in Everyday Life. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Schlesinger, Philip, & Tumber, Howard (1994) Reporting Crime: The Media Politics of Criminal Justice. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Seiman, Irving (2013) Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences. New York: Columbia Univ. Teachers College Press.Google Scholar
Shephard, Kathryn (2014) “Mug Shot Disclosure Under FOIA: Does Privacy or Public Interest Prevail?” 108 Northwestern Law Rev. 343–78.Google Scholar
Silbey, Susan (2005) “After Legal Consciousness,” 1 Annual Rev. of Law and Society 323–68.Google Scholar
Surette, Ray (2003) “The Media, the Public, and Criminal Justice Policy,” 2 J. of the Institution of Justice and International Studies 39–52.Google Scholar
Thatcher, David (2008) “The Rise of Criminal Background Screening in Rental Housing,” 33 Law and Social Inquiry 5–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tucher, Andie (1999) “Framing the Criminal: Trade Secrets of the Crime Reporter,” 43 New York Law School Law Rev. 905–13.Google Scholar
Tyler, Tom R. (2003) “Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law,” 30 Crime and Justice 283–357.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uggen, Christopher, et al. (2014) “The Edge of Stigma: An Experimental Audit of the Effects of Low-Level Criminal Records on Employment,” 52 Criminology 627–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uggen, Chrisopher, & Blahnik, Lindsay (2015) The increasing stickiness of public labels. In Shapland, J., Farrall, S., & Bottoms, A., eds., Global Perspectives on Desistance. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Uggen, Chrisopher, & Stewart, Robert (2015) “Piling On: Collateral Consequences and Community Supervision,” 99 Minnesota Law Rev. 1871–912.Google Scholar
United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (2005) “Improving Access to and Integrity of Criminal History Records.”Google Scholar
United States Department of Justice (2014a) Prisoners in 2013. Washington DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.Google Scholar
United States Department of Justice (2014b) Crime in the United States 2013. Washington DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.Google Scholar
Wade, Chris (2014) The Reddit Reckoning. Slate.com, 15 April. Available at: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/04/reddit_and_the_boston_marathon_bombings_how_the_site_reckoned_with_its_own.html (accessed 10 March 2015).Google Scholar
Watstein, Ryan D. (2009) “Out of Jail and Out of Luck: The Effect of Negligent Hiring Liability and the Criminal Record Revolution on an Ex-Offender's Employment Prospects,” 61 Florida Law Rev. 581–610.Google Scholar
Winnick, Terri A., & Bodkin, Mark (2008) “Anticipated stigma and stigma management among those to be labeled “ex-con,” 29 Deviant Behavior 295–333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn, 420 U.S. 469 (1975).Google Scholar
Department of Air Force v. Rose, 425 U.S. 352 (1976).Google Scholar
Detroit Free Press Inc. v. United States Department of Justice, 2:13-cv-12939 (6th Cir., (2016).Google Scholar
European Union Court of Justice. Judgment of the Court (Grand Chamber) of 13 May (2014).Google Scholar
Google Spain SL and Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) and Mario Costeja González. Case C-131/12. ECLI identifier: ECLI:EU:C:2014:317.Google Scholar
Florida Star v. B. J. F., 491 U.S. 524 (1989).Google Scholar
Martin v. Hearst Corporation, 777 F.3d 546, 2d Cir. (2015).Google Scholar
United States Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749 (1989).Google Scholar
Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. ___ (2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Minn. Stat. § 609A.01 “Expungement of Criminal Records.”Google Scholar