Although criminal records appear to straightforwardly document encounters with the criminal-legal system, Melissa Burch shows their meanings and consequences are anything but self-evident. In the United States, where employers routinely use criminal-history information in hiring, records have become consequential instruments of labor-market sorting. In The Criminal Record Complex, Burch traces how records are assembled, circulated, and acted upon in employment. Police and courts produce information. Technology companies make it legible. Screening firms package it for sale. Insurers translate it into liability. Employers use it for uncertain predictions about trustworthiness, safety, and performance. Altogether, these entanglements form what Burch labels the “criminal record complex.” It is a concept that refers to a sociolegal infrastructure that transforms criminalized events from the past into ostensibly objective evidence for hiring decisions.

The concept identifies an interlocking set of legal rules, administrative procedures, developing technology, professional practices, and cultural assumptions that make criminal-history screening appear natural if not necessary. Whereas existing scholarship establishes that criminal records reduce employment opportunities, with especially severe consequences for poor Black job seekers, Burch pursues another question altogether: How did employers come to regard a person’s criminal history as an indispensable hiring tool, and why do so many exclude applicants with records even when they express a willingness to hire them? Her answer moves beyond individualistic accounts of prejudice without absolving specific decision-makers. Employers operate within organizational fields that not only reward risk management but make inclusion administratively burdensome. Discrimination becomes embedded in ordinary routines through which organizations demonstrate prudence, legality, and professionalism.

Burch develops the argument through ethnographic research in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Beginning in 2014, she conducted participant observation at a workforce-development organization, assisting people with felony convictions as they prepared résumés, navigated applications, and rehearsed interviews. The study’s 2014 starting point also predates the recent proliferation of AI-mediated hiring tools, an important context for reading Burch’s account of technology-mediated screening. In addition to working with job seekers, Burch accompanied business owners and hiring managers, attended gatherings of human-resource professionals, and interviewed employers. This multi-sited design allows her to follow criminal-history information as it travels among applicants, intermediaries, and employers rather than treating hiring as an isolated encounter.

The book is most effective when it shows how seemingly reasonable demands become impossible under the conditions people with criminal records face. They must maintain employment while reporting to supervising officers, completing routine drug tests, and securing travel permission. Available jobs may be distant from affordable housing or begin before public transportation starts running. Applicants who spent years in prison often return to a labor market transformed by digital technologies (e.g., online automated applications) they had little opportunity to learn. As if such factors were not daunting enough, those marked by a criminal record must repeatedly perform as transformed subjects while revisiting a conviction that supposedly belongs in their past. In one revealing experience, for example, an applicant resists a coach’s advice to express greater remorse during a mock interview (p. 109). He sees redemption narratives as a misrepresentation of how he understands his own actions. There was no remorse; he saw his crime as defending family members. What appears to be practical interview advice becomes a high-stakes game of moral redemption. Job seekers learn that employment depends on being seen as penitent, governable, and deserving.

The history behind Burch’s notion of a criminal record complex is valuable to law and society scholarship because it shows how legal institutions do not merely authorize or prohibit discrimination. Laws can be leveraged to constitute the categories, information systems, and organizational incentives through which discrimination occurs, especially within a legal landscape riddled with contradictions. Employers may be warned that hiring someone with a record exposes them to negligent-hiring claims, while federal guidance and state legislation discourage or prohibit blanket exclusions. Government contracts, occupational licensing rules, and regulatory mandates restrict hiring in some settings. In others, fair-chance laws direct employers to defer any consideration of convictions. Faced with this fragmented environment, companies often adopt background checks as a defensive ritual. Screening demonstrates that an employer took this risk seriously even when a record has little to no relationship with job performance and workplace safety.

If I were to ask the author one question, it would concern the conceptual limits of a criminal record complex. The broad-reaching contribution evokes a host of factors at once, from cultural stigma to professional norms to administrative burdens to technological innovation to market pressures to employer beliefs. While the argument’s capaciousness allows Burch to capture the many dispersed and attritional barriers to employment, this very feature makes the concept a difficult one to delimit. Nearly every force that bears on a hiring decision can be incorporated into the criminal record complex after the fact. A more explicit account of how these elements are ordered, and what mechanisms become decisive under which conditions, would clarify its conceptual utility. For example, are stigma, administrative burdens, professional norms, and technological systems parallel sources of exclusion, mutually reinforcing mechanisms, or sequenced processes that enable criminal records to acquire their force? Answering questions like these could explain not only how the criminal record complex operates, but also why its effects vary across organizations, occupations, and labor markets.

My question does not diminish the book’s considerable achievement. Burch writes with refreshing transparency about her political commitments, positionality, and ethical decisions. Her central lesson is that the criminal record is neither a neutral document nor simply a consequence of punishment. Rather, criminal records are productive in the sense that they are continuously remade through law, organizational practice, market exchange, technological circulation, and everyday interpretation. She shows how legality can restrain exclusion while simultaneously furnishing its categories and rationales, how reforms can challenge stigma while leaving its infrastructure intact, and how well-intentioned people become agents of institutional sorting. The Criminal Record Complex is an important account of the administrative afterlife of criminalization and a compelling demonstration that ending record-based exclusion requires more than changing individual minds. It will require dismantling the sociolegal arrangements that allow a conviction to perpetually diminish a person’s future employability.