Most of us have probably Googled ourselves at one time or another. If you found something inaccurate or embarrassing—a rumor, a mugshot, an advertisement promising details about a “possible” criminal history—you were far from alone. This book documents countless painful stories of Americans who, in an age of mass surveillance and incarceration, discovered their reputations tarnished by online information linking them with the criminal justice system. Particularly impressive is the way it manages to situate these accounts within the wider ecosystem of actors responsible for digitizing and disseminating that information. Marshalling hundreds of interviews, observations at various field sites in three states, and documentary sources, Digital Punishment guides us through the worlds of local and state bureaucrats, online sleuthing sites, reputation management firms, and even civilian “digilantes” intent on exposing crime in their neighborhoods. Together, this makes for a phenomenologically rich and normatively unsettling account of what happens when criminal records go digital.

First things first. Lageson helpfully problematizes the very term “criminal record.” Contrary to the popular imaginary, individuals in the United States rarely have one comprehensive, integrated dossier of their criminal justice contact. Rather, their “records” can entail (sometimes conflicting) information spread across a vast and ever-expanding array of sources, from the thousands of county- and state-level law enforcement agencies and courts to the private data aggregators who purchase their records. To hold onto our image of a dossier, we must at the very least imagine one scattered by the wind and marred by the elements.

Digital Punishment documents the administrative, legal, economic, and cultural forces in the United States that combine to energize the commodification and proliferation of criminal record information online. Law enforcement and the courts, facing resource constraints and perceived legal responsibilities for transparency, contracted with private data aggregators to digitize, analyze, and disseminate criminal record information. Yet these organizational pressures, Lageson points out, are insufficient to sustain the incredible market for digital criminal records we see today; to sell a product, one also needs demand. Here, companies selling digitized information about criminal justice contact stoke and prey upon public anxiety about crime victimization, fueling the perception that Americans owe it to themselves, their families, and their communities to stay abreast of even the faintest hint of criminal activity within their spheres of influence. This story echoes the broad literature on deregulation and the privatization of risk. Of course, not every individual takes up this call to vigilance and suspicion. But some do, most significantly the (perhaps growing) subset of Americans who participate in online neighborhood and crime forums and especially the “digilantes” Lageson studied who make it their mission to generate content for those forums. Moreover, in an age when we are all expected to do our “due diligence” to ensure personal and public safety, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify ignoring this content entirely.

At this point, Digital Punishment indicts Google for its paradoxical role as both unofficial arbiter of truth and self-interested information capitalist enterprise. Google search, as many scholars have now shown, is not a neutral tool for accessing information; it privileges results based on cultural tendencies and economic imperatives, both of which aid and abet the proliferation of digital criminal records. Data aggregators game search algorithms and leverage paid advertisements to drive their content to the top of Google results, thereby raising the stakes for those linked to the records.

We thus come to see more fully who benefits from this whole exchange of public records. Public agencies gain insights, efficiency, sometimes additional funds (from the sale of records), and plausible (if not always strictly legal) claims to compliance with transparency requirements. Data aggregators generate profits from the aggregation and sale of public data as well as more nefariously extorting people for thousands of dollars to remove it. Members of the lay public, and crime victims and digital sleuths in particular, obtain access to information on crimes and perpetrators. And Google—the witting or unwitting tool that makes this whole system viable—acquires additional search traffic and profits from the sale of advertising.

This seemingly symbiotic relationship appears considerably more parasitic from the viewpoint of the subjects of all this information. The drive for efficiency, transparency, and profit exacts a severe human cost above and beyond the formal legal sentences of the criminal justice system. Mugshots and other records of arrests appear online before facing adjudication in courtrooms. Through administrative error and identity theft, inaccuracies creep in at every turn. Punishment, therefore, extends beyond those ensnared by “mass incarceration” to include countless others never convicted or even charged of a crime. Making matters worse, cleaning up one’s digital criminal record constitutes a Sisyphean task. When information about their criminal justice contact ends up online, individuals may contact various government agencies, hosting websites, and even Google in an attempt to remove sealed or inaccurate information. A select few have the time and financial resources to pursue such measures. Lageson, for instance, recounts the story of Kyle, a white, middle-class man with a computer science degree and an IT job. Although arrested for a marijuana offence in 2008 and implicated in a sexual misconduct scandal four years later, both investigations fell apart due to lack of evidence. Since the local police posted about arrests online—a not altogether uncommon practice documented in the book—Kyle’s mugshot and other information about his experiences still appeared in online media. Despite successfully petitioning for expungement, Kyle watched as the news persisted in internet searches. He proceeded to employ search engine optimization techniques to drive the stigmatizing information down in search results, posted and tagged himself in numerous images to displace mugshots, and hired a reputation management company. Though mostly successful, his results came at the cost of continual maintenance to ensure offending content did not resurface in search results. Kyle’s story is unusual only to the extent of his effort to control the online narrative about him; sooner or later, most people with whom Lageson interacted understandably gave up. To cope with the discrediting information, they avoided Googling their names; avoided applying for jobs; avoided volunteering at their houses of worship or their children’s schools. Devah Pager’s phrase the “mark of a criminal record” thus takes on new meaning in the digital age.

Concerns about the accuracy of databases and the shadow of criminal records are nothing new in the United States. In the early 1970s, for instance, policymakers and activists raised concerns about transparency and errors with respect to credit reports. Their efforts culminated in the passage of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) which, among other things, holds “consumer reporting agencies” at least minimally responsible for ensuring accuracy, grants individuals the right to see their “consumer reports,” and necessitates the establishment of organizational processes for disputing information. The data aggregators at the heart of Digital Punishment, however, have generally evaded regulation under FCRA by qualifying that their records are not to be used as “consumer reports.” The other major regulatory approaches to criminal records—expungement and so-called “ban the box” laws that proscribe consideration of criminal records in hiring processes—similarly fall short in the case of digital information. Lageson shows how expungement addresses only formal records, doing little to control the sharing and re-posting of information online. Moreover, some expungement procedures hinge on individuals accurately recounting their criminal histories—a difficult task when “accuracy” is measured against frequently flawed digital records. We learn about Carl, for instance, a “mild-mannered Newark man in his mid-30s” who was denied expungement for a felony, unlawful possession of a weapon, after a judge noted his failure to list arrests and a probation violation from the late 90s—incidents of which Carl had no knowledge. And while “ban the box” laws can protect against formal organizational discrimination, employers and landlords—not to mention family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, fellow church-goers, and other acquaintances—may simply turn to informal Google searches to make judgments about people’s backgrounds and character. In terms of regulations, then, the new world of digital criminal records looks a whole lot like an old western.

These issues speak to the relatively weak data regulatory regime in the United States, a theme woven throughout Digital Punishment. But how, then, does digital punishment play out in other regulatory contexts? What, for instance, should we expect in the European Union following the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)? Here Lageson—constrained by the understandable focus of her project—merely skims the surface. While she briefly compares the US’s limited privacy protections and robust immunity laws for tech companies to the ways that European Courts and the GDPR have prioritized “digital protection” for individuals, we learn little about how these differences actually inform efforts to maintain and clean up digital reputations. Where Americans struggle and give up, do Europeans generally fare better? One area—requests to Google to delist URLs associated with an individual’s name—offers some suggestive evidence. Google reports having more than one million requests to delist nearly four and a half million URLs since the May 2014 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union establishing the “right to be forgotten.” Yet they only followed through with delisting 53% of those. Among the most common reasons for not delisting URLs, Google cites internal determinations regarding whether “the page contains information which is strongly in the public interest” including judgments involving “whether the content relates to […] a past crime […] consists of government documents, or is journalistic in nature.” To readers of Lageson’s book, these lines should sound eerily familiar—they are virtually identical to the justifications underlying the American system. What will it take, then, for regulation to truly disrupt the harmful processes at work in the book?

Perhaps the biggest issue hampering regulation is a lack of agreement on the purpose of punishment and the meaning of justice. Here Digital Punishment raises a number of provocative questions, not only for students and scholars of the criminal justice system but for society at large. What does due process look like in an age when bookings and dismissed charges can more or less permanently taint one’s online—and by extension, offline—reputation? What is the meaning of expungement when only formal legal institutions—but not digital news media or online sleuthing sites—are required to seal one’s records? And even for those duly and justly convicted, should we tolerate perpetual online shaming, or ought we to champion a more robust notion of forgiveness? In terms of this last question, the book speaks to contemporary concerns regarding the lifespan of digital information. As we see in stories about political muckraking/smearing and popular “cancelling,” our digital information never dies, especially when indexed by search engines. The stories of Digital Punishment make it clear that such concerns are both far more widespread and more mundane than the coverage of high-profile incidents can capture. The book, then, asks us to confront familiar philosophical questions about punishment and justice, recalibrated for a digitized world.

Finally, although Digital Punishment restricts itself largely to concerns associated with criminal records and the justice system, the book should inspire broader critical consideration of how we assign responsibility for managing personal information. Harms associated with inaccurate or expunged digital criminal records result in no small part from a toxic blend of heavy reliance on data and a lack of accountability for managing it. These conditions certainly do not apply exclusively to criminal records. In the United States, for example, organizations use personal data to (among countless other things) calculate crime and child abuse risks, regulate migration, and assess eligibility for healthcare, voting, public benefits, credit, housing, employment, and insurance. What happens when disputes about data of such import inevitably arise? Facing pressure from individuals or advocates, organizations in Digital Punishment passed the buck: the police blamed the courts; reputation management companies blamed the government agencies who released the information; and search engines blamed the websites that posted content. This finger pointing has arguably more to do with the contemporary political economy of information than anything peculiar to criminal records. US regulations shift considerable responsibility for ensuring accurate data onto individuals, leaving them to navigate opaque or nonexistent organizational resolution processes largely on their own. Many of the conditions Lageson documents thus punish individuals not only for the appearance of criminal justice contact, but potentially anything that appears “bad” or “unworthy” from the perspective of organizations or the wider public.

Briefly consider the case of consumer credit. In that arena, as in the criminal justice system, administrative error and identity theft can and do leave individuals struggling to dispute personal information to restore not only access to crucial resources and opportunities but also personal dignity. While Digital Punishment focuses on the criminal justice system, readers ought to diagnose a deeper digital malaise. Certainly, differences exist between personal financial data and digital criminal records, not the least of which involves unique public perceptions about how privacy and transparency apply to each case. Yet precisely by attending to the similarities and differences between these and other systems, we can more fully appreciate what is novel about digital criminal records and what is, in fact, a more widespread threat of punishment in the digital age.