Sarah Lageson
Biographic Data
| ID | 304177 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sarah Lageson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sarah |
| FAMILY NAME | Lageson |
| SIGNATURE | LAGESON S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4108-4365 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 413 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Traces of Criminal Records: Digital Reputation and Information Concealment Policy
In the United States, a robust data ecosystem aggregates and shares public records about people that may ultimately appear in Internet search results for a person's name. These records can include stigmatizing information and operate outside public policy efforts to conceal negative information from regulated background screening processes. Our study assesses the Internet search results of 225 people who have been charged or convicted of crime to…
The Symbiotic Harm of a Criminal Record
Having a criminal record significantly alters a person’s life chances, decreasing their opportunities for employment, housing, student loans, voting, public benefits, and more. The collateral consequences of criminal convictions, or the civil restrictions that follow criminal convictions, are well documented. However, because individuals are connected to families and communities, it is impossible to isolate the effects of punishment to only the p…
Criminal Records as Classification Situations
Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy developed the notion of “classification situations” to describe how ordinal schema that sort and rank individuals, like credit scores, are used to differentiate opportunities, prices, and services in ways that structure life chances while masking inequality as meritocratic. We argue that contemporary criminal records increasingly function as such classificatory tools. The proliferation of alternatives to tradition…
Automating administrative burden in algorithmic criminal record expungement
Administrative burden describes the learning costs, psychological costs, and compliance costs people face when attempting to interface with the government, particularly in seeking a benefit. Algorithmic and automated processes offer the potential of reducing administrative burdens, but scant empirical research has determined to what, if any effect. This study uses the case of criminal record expungement in two policy contexts: traditional, court …
This is everyone's issue”: Policy entrepreneurs, issue framing, and coalition building in the passage of automatic criminal record expungement
Research Summary Since 2018, at least 12 U.S. states have introduced policies to expunge certain eligible arrest and criminal conviction records through automated or algorithmic means. Drawing on interviews with governmental representatives and community stakeholders, this paper identifies strategies used to pass this legislation in Pennsylvania and Utah, the first two states to enact automated expungement policies. We frame our findings around t…
The Artificially Unintelligent Data Double
This essay engages with Haggerty and Ericson's concept of the "data double" to examine how contemporary surveillance practices have produced increasingly powerful yet fundamentally flawed representations of individuals. While the surveillant assemblage remains central to modern life, today's data doubles are characterized by a paradox: they wield immense decision-making power in determining access to housing, employment, credit, and healthcare, y…
Digital punishment, lateral surveillance & the sex offense registry
The maintenance of a public sex offense registry has been codified as a non-punitive civil policy since the 2003 Supreme Court case of Smith v. Doe. But since then, sex offense registries have transformed from a centralized state repository of information to a sprawling digital archive of personal data about people required to register. We identify and report the current technological capabilities of state-run sex offense registries through a 50-…
The mark or trace of a criminal record: A survey experiment of race and criminal record signaling
Employment discrimination from a criminal record is a salient social fact, evidenced by a robust body of experimental research. In Part 1 of this study, we analyze prior criminal record hiring experiments—comprising in‐person audits, online audits, and opt‐in surveys—to describe patterns over time in employer receptivity to applicants of different races with criminal records. In Part 2, we use a novel experimental survey of 1080 employers to meas…
Access to justice at the intersection of civil and criminal law
The problem with criminal records: Discrepancies between state reports and private‐sector background checks
Criminal records are routinely used by employers and other institutional decision‐makers who rely on their presumed fidelity to evaluate applicants. We analyze criminal records for a sample of 101 people, comparing official state reports, two sources of private‐sector background checks (one regulated and one unregulated by federal law), and qualitative interviews. Based on our analysis, private‐sector background checks are laden with false‐positi…
The Stress of Injustice: Public Defenders and the Frontline of American Inequality
Fairness in the criminal legal system is unattainable without effective legal representation of indigent defendants, yet we know little about the experience of attorneys who do this critical work. Using semi-structured interviews, our study investigated occupational stress in a sample of 78 attorneys representing indigent clients across the United States. We show how the chronic stressors experienced at work culminate in what we define as the str…
Surveillance deputies: When ordinary people surveil for the state
The state has long relied on ordinary civilians to do surveillance work, but recent advances in networked technologies are expanding mechanisms for surveillance and social control. In this article, we analyze the phenomenon in which private individuals conduct surveillance on behalf of the state, often using private sector technologies to do so. We develop the concept ofsurveillance deputiesto describe when ordinary people, rather than state acto…
Criminal Record Stigma and Surveillance in the Digital Age
This review analyzes criminal record stigma and surveillance through the concept of digital punishment: the collection and widespread dissemination of personally identifiable data by the American criminal legal system and subsequent private actors. The analysis is organized into three parts: a descriptive account of the technological, legal, and social factors that have created mass criminal record data; a theoretical framework for understanding …
Introduction to Special Issue: Incarceration, Violence, and Voice
Patchwork disclosure: Divergent public access and personal privacy across criminal record disclosure policy in the United States
Scholars have paid minimal attention to state statutory guidance that allows criminal justice agencies to disclose records that contain personal information about arrestees, defendants, and incarcerated people. We analyze US state policy for police, courts, prisons, and record repositories (N = 200). Most states restrict access to compiled criminal histories, but nearly all allow broad public access to agency records. Divergent policy guidance ac…
Before and After Ban the Box: Who Complies with Anti-Discrimination Law
Ban the Box (BTB) laws are an anti-discrimination policy intended to promote employment for persons with criminal records. However, research on law and organizations shows that firms often fail to comply with legal directives or engage in symbolic compliance that fails to alter day-to-day business practices. We consider whether BTB contributed to attitudinal or behavioral shifts among hiring managers and changes in job applications. We analyze a …
Digitizing and Disclosing Personal Data: The Proliferation of State Criminal Records on the Internet
Digitization and the release of public records on the Internet have expanded the reach and uses of criminal record data in the United States. This study analyzes the types and volume of personally identifiable data released on the Internet via two hundred public governmental websites for law enforcement, criminal courts, corrections, and criminal record repositories in each state. We find that public disclosures often include information valuable…
Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life
Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice
Data-driven criminal justice operations creates millions of criminal records each year in the United States. Documenting everything from a police stop to a prison sentence, these records take on a digital life of their own as they are collected and posted by police, courts, and prisons; reposted on social media, online news, and mugshot galleries; and bought and sold by data brokers as an increasingly valuable data commodity. The result is “digit…
Disordered Punishment: Workaround Technologies of Criminal Records Disclosure and the Rise of a New Penal Entrepreneurialism
The privatization of punishment is a well-established phenomenon in modern criminal justice operations. Less understood are the market and technological forces that have dramatically reshaped the creation and sharing of criminal record data in recent years. Analysing trends in both the United States and Europe, we argue that this massive shift is cause to reconceptualize theories of penal entrepreneurialism to more directly address the role of te…
Gendered Public Support for Criminalizing “Revenge Porn”
Many states have criminalized “revenge porn,” an increasingly common form of online sexual abuse. Yet, we know little regarding attitudes toward these laws. Through an original survey of nearly 500 U.S. residents, we find widespread public support for criminalization, but support varies by respondent’s self-identified gender and revenge porn type. Women favor criminalization more than men, but support falls among women and men when the subject cr…
The Politics of Public Punishment
Privatizing criminal stigma: Experience, intergroup contact, and public views about publicizing arrest records
Current U.S. policy allows private companies to publish arrest records prior to conviction in print and online sources, yet little is known regarding the extent to which people actively search for criminal records or whether the public supports these policies. Utilizing two large public opinion surveys (N = 1008 and N = 1601), we find that approximately 15% of Americans searched online for conviction records last year (an estimated 38 million peo…
Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of New Media
Criminal Record Questions in the Era of “Ban the Box”
Research Summary This study examines three central questions about criminal record inquiries on job applications, which is a rapidly developing area in criminology and public policy. We find the following: (1) Among the 78% of employers who ask about records, specific application questions vary greatly regarding the severity and timing of offenses. (2) Applications for restaurant positions are least likely to inquire about criminal histories, whe…
The Edge of Stigma: An Experimental Audit of the Effects of Low‐level Criminal Records on Employment
Ample experimental evidence shows that the stigma of a prison record reduces employment opportunities (Pager, 2007). Yet background checks today uncover a much broader range of impropriety, including arrests for minor crimes never resulting in formal charges. This article probes the lesser boundaries of stigma, asking whether and how employers consider low‐level arrests in hiring decisions. Matched pairs of young African American and White men we…
Legal Ambiguity in Managerial Assessments of Criminal Records
In an age of widespread background checks, we ask how managers in different organizational contexts navigate legal ambiguity in assessing applicants' criminal history information, based on interview data obtained in a recent field experiment. The study builds on institutional analyses of the social sources of workplace legality to describe how employers consider applicants with criminal histories. We find that some organizations set explicit stan…
Criminal Record Questions in the Era of “Ban the Box”
Research Summary This study examines three central questions about criminal record inquiries on job applications, which is a rapidly developing area in criminology and public policy. We find the following: (1) Among the 78% of employers who ask about records, specific application questions vary greatly regarding the severity and timing of offenses. (2) Applications for restaurant positions are least likely to inquire about criminal histories, whe…
Found Out and Opting Out: The Consequences of Online Criminal Records for Families
Online criminal histories document and publicize even minor brushes with the law and represent people who may not even be guilty of any crime. This has dramatically changed the relationship that millions of Americans have with the criminal justice system and may affect their social and private lives. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork with people attempting to expunge and legally seal their criminal records, I explore how online versions of thes…
Digital degradation: Stigma management in the internet age
The concept of stigma and labeling has been central to the sociology of punishment since at least the writings of Durkheim and Mead. However, the vast transformations brought on by the expansion of the internet over the past 20 years suggest the need for revisiting the dynamics of labeling. While the power to apply extralegal criminal labels is now in the hands of many, stigma in the form of a digital footprint is arguably more difficult than eve…
Crime Data, the Internet, and Free Speech: An Evolving Legal Consciousness
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 a…
Statistical Power in Experimental Audit Studies: Cautions and Calculations for Matched Tests With Nominal Outcomes
Given their capacity to identify causal relationships, experimental audit studies have grown increasingly popular in the social sciences. Typically, investigators send fictitious auditors who differ by a key factor (e.g., race) to particular experimental units (e.g., employers) and then compare treatment and control groups on a dichotomous outcome (e.g., hiring). In such scenarios, an important design consideration is the power to detect a certai…
Before and After Ban the Box: Who Complies with Anti-Discrimination Law
Ban the Box (BTB) laws are an anti-discrimination policy intended to promote employment for persons with criminal records. However, research on law and organizations shows that firms often fail to comply with legal directives or engage in symbolic compliance that fails to alter day-to-day business practices. We consider whether BTB contributed to attitudinal or behavioral shifts among hiring managers and changes in job applications. We analyze a …
Privatizing criminal stigma: Experience, intergroup contact, and public views about publicizing arrest records
Current U.S. policy allows private companies to publish arrest records prior to conviction in print and online sources, yet little is known regarding the extent to which people actively search for criminal records or whether the public supports these policies. Utilizing two large public opinion surveys (N = 1008 and N = 1601), we find that approximately 15% of Americans searched online for conviction records last year (an estimated 38 million peo…
Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life
Disordered Punishment: Workaround Technologies of Criminal Records Disclosure and the Rise of a New Penal Entrepreneurialism
The privatization of punishment is a well-established phenomenon in modern criminal justice operations. Less understood are the market and technological forces that have dramatically reshaped the creation and sharing of criminal record data in recent years. Analysing trends in both the United States and Europe, we argue that this massive shift is cause to reconceptualize theories of penal entrepreneurialism to more directly address the role of te…
Surveillance deputies: When ordinary people surveil for the state
The state has long relied on ordinary civilians to do surveillance work, but recent advances in networked technologies are expanding mechanisms for surveillance and social control. In this article, we analyze the phenomenon in which private individuals conduct surveillance on behalf of the state, often using private sector technologies to do so. We develop the concept ofsurveillance deputiesto describe when ordinary people, rather than state acto…
Digitizing and Disclosing Personal Data: The Proliferation of State Criminal Records on the Internet
Digitization and the release of public records on the Internet have expanded the reach and uses of criminal record data in the United States. This study analyzes the types and volume of personally identifiable data released on the Internet via two hundred public governmental websites for law enforcement, criminal courts, corrections, and criminal record repositories in each state. We find that public disclosures often include information valuable…
The problem with criminal records: Discrepancies between state reports and private‐sector background checks
Criminal records are routinely used by employers and other institutional decision‐makers who rely on their presumed fidelity to evaluate applicants. We analyze criminal records for a sample of 101 people, comparing official state reports, two sources of private‐sector background checks (one regulated and one unregulated by federal law), and qualitative interviews. Based on our analysis, private‐sector background checks are laden with false‐positi…
Gendered Public Support for Criminalizing “Revenge Porn”
Many states have criminalized “revenge porn,” an increasingly common form of online sexual abuse. Yet, we know little regarding attitudes toward these laws. Through an original survey of nearly 500 U.S. residents, we find widespread public support for criminalization, but support varies by respondent’s self-identified gender and revenge porn type. Women favor criminalization more than men, but support falls among women and men when the subject cr…
The Stress of Injustice: Public Defenders and the Frontline of American Inequality
Fairness in the criminal legal system is unattainable without effective legal representation of indigent defendants, yet we know little about the experience of attorneys who do this critical work. Using semi-structured interviews, our study investigated occupational stress in a sample of 78 attorneys representing indigent clients across the United States. We show how the chronic stressors experienced at work culminate in what we define as the str…
Patchwork disclosure: Divergent public access and personal privacy across criminal record disclosure policy in the United States
Scholars have paid minimal attention to state statutory guidance that allows criminal justice agencies to disclose records that contain personal information about arrestees, defendants, and incarcerated people. We analyze US state policy for police, courts, prisons, and record repositories (N = 200). Most states restrict access to compiled criminal histories, but nearly all allow broad public access to agency records. Divergent policy guidance ac…
Taste clusters of music and drugs: Evidence From Three Analytic Levels
This article examines taste clusters of musical preferences and substance use among adolescents and young adults. Three analytic levels are considered: fixed effects analyses of aggregate listening patterns and substance use in US radio markets, logistic regressions of individual genre preferences and drug use from a nationally representative survey of US youth, and arrest and seizure data from a large American concert venue. A consistent picture…
Access to justice at the intersection of civil and criminal law
The mark or trace of a criminal record: A survey experiment of race and criminal record signaling
Employment discrimination from a criminal record is a salient social fact, evidenced by a robust body of experimental research. In Part 1 of this study, we analyze prior criminal record hiring experiments—comprising in‐person audits, online audits, and opt‐in surveys—to describe patterns over time in employer receptivity to applicants of different races with criminal records. In Part 2, we use a novel experimental survey of 1080 employers to meas…
The Politics of Public Punishment
Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of New Media
Legal Ambiguity in Managerial Assessments of Criminal Records
In an age of widespread background checks, we ask how managers in different organizational contexts navigate legal ambiguity in assessing applicants' criminal history information, based on interview data obtained in a recent field experiment. The study builds on institutional analyses of the social sources of workplace legality to describe how employers consider applicants with criminal histories. We find that some organizations set explicit stan…
The Edge of Stigma: An Experimental Audit of the Effects of Low‐level Criminal Records on Employment
Ample experimental evidence shows that the stigma of a prison record reduces employment opportunities (Pager, 2007). Yet background checks today uncover a much broader range of impropriety, including arrests for minor crimes never resulting in formal charges. This article probes the lesser boundaries of stigma, asking whether and how employers consider low‐level arrests in hiring decisions. Matched pairs of young African American and White men we…
Taste clusters of music and drugs: Evidence From Three Analytic Levels
This article examines taste clusters of musical preferences and substance use among adolescents and young adults. Three analytic levels are considered: fixed effects analyses of aggregate listening patterns and substance use in US radio markets, logistic regressions of individual genre preferences and drug use from a nationally representative survey of US youth, and arrest and seizure data from a large American concert venue. A consistent picture…
Found Out and Opting Out: The Consequences of Online Criminal Records for Families
Online criminal histories document and publicize even minor brushes with the law and represent people who may not even be guilty of any crime. This has dramatically changed the relationship that millions of Americans have with the criminal justice system and may affect their social and private lives. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork with people attempting to expunge and legally seal their criminal records, I explore how online versions of thes…
Statistical Power in Experimental Audit Studies: Cautions and Calculations for Matched Tests With Nominal Outcomes
Given their capacity to identify causal relationships, experimental audit studies have grown increasingly popular in the social sciences. Typically, investigators send fictitious auditors who differ by a key factor (e.g., race) to particular experimental units (e.g., employers) and then compare treatment and control groups on a dichotomous outcome (e.g., hiring). In such scenarios, an important design consideration is the power to detect a certai…
Criminal Record Questions in the Era of “Ban the Box”
Research Summary This study examines three central questions about criminal record inquiries on job applications, which is a rapidly developing area in criminology and public policy. We find the following: (1) Among the 78% of employers who ask about records, specific application questions vary greatly regarding the severity and timing of offenses. (2) Applications for restaurant positions are least likely to inquire about criminal histories, whe…
Digital degradation: Stigma management in the internet age
The concept of stigma and labeling has been central to the sociology of punishment since at least the writings of Durkheim and Mead. However, the vast transformations brought on by the expansion of the internet over the past 20 years suggest the need for revisiting the dynamics of labeling. While the power to apply extralegal criminal labels is now in the hands of many, stigma in the form of a digital footprint is arguably more difficult than eve…
Crime Data, the Internet, and Free Speech: An Evolving Legal Consciousness
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 a…
Gendered Public Support for Criminalizing “Revenge Porn”
Many states have criminalized “revenge porn,” an increasingly common form of online sexual abuse. Yet, we know little regarding attitudes toward these laws. Through an original survey of nearly 500 U.S. residents, we find widespread public support for criminalization, but support varies by respondent’s self-identified gender and revenge porn type. Women favor criminalization more than men, but support falls among women and men when the subject cr…
The Politics of Public Punishment
Privatizing criminal stigma: Experience, intergroup contact, and public views about publicizing arrest records
Current U.S. policy allows private companies to publish arrest records prior to conviction in print and online sources, yet little is known regarding the extent to which people actively search for criminal records or whether the public supports these policies. Utilizing two large public opinion surveys (N = 1008 and N = 1601), we find that approximately 15% of Americans searched online for conviction records last year (an estimated 38 million peo…
Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of New Media
Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice
Data-driven criminal justice operations creates millions of criminal records each year in the United States. Documenting everything from a police stop to a prison sentence, these records take on a digital life of their own as they are collected and posted by police, courts, and prisons; reposted on social media, online news, and mugshot galleries; and bought and sold by data brokers as an increasingly valuable data commodity. The result is “digit…
Disordered Punishment: Workaround Technologies of Criminal Records Disclosure and the Rise of a New Penal Entrepreneurialism
The privatization of punishment is a well-established phenomenon in modern criminal justice operations. Less understood are the market and technological forces that have dramatically reshaped the creation and sharing of criminal record data in recent years. Analysing trends in both the United States and Europe, we argue that this massive shift is cause to reconceptualize theories of penal entrepreneurialism to more directly address the role of te…
Before and After Ban the Box: Who Complies with Anti-Discrimination Law
Ban the Box (BTB) laws are an anti-discrimination policy intended to promote employment for persons with criminal records. However, research on law and organizations shows that firms often fail to comply with legal directives or engage in symbolic compliance that fails to alter day-to-day business practices. We consider whether BTB contributed to attitudinal or behavioral shifts among hiring managers and changes in job applications. We analyze a …
Digitizing and Disclosing Personal Data: The Proliferation of State Criminal Records on the Internet
Digitization and the release of public records on the Internet have expanded the reach and uses of criminal record data in the United States. This study analyzes the types and volume of personally identifiable data released on the Internet via two hundred public governmental websites for law enforcement, criminal courts, corrections, and criminal record repositories in each state. We find that public disclosures often include information valuable…
Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life
Criminal Record Stigma and Surveillance in the Digital Age
This review analyzes criminal record stigma and surveillance through the concept of digital punishment: the collection and widespread dissemination of personally identifiable data by the American criminal legal system and subsequent private actors. The analysis is organized into three parts: a descriptive account of the technological, legal, and social factors that have created mass criminal record data; a theoretical framework for understanding …
Introduction to Special Issue: Incarceration, Violence, and Voice
Patchwork disclosure: Divergent public access and personal privacy across criminal record disclosure policy in the United States
Scholars have paid minimal attention to state statutory guidance that allows criminal justice agencies to disclose records that contain personal information about arrestees, defendants, and incarcerated people. We analyze US state policy for police, courts, prisons, and record repositories (N = 200). Most states restrict access to compiled criminal histories, but nearly all allow broad public access to agency records. Divergent policy guidance ac…
Surveillance deputies: When ordinary people surveil for the state
The state has long relied on ordinary civilians to do surveillance work, but recent advances in networked technologies are expanding mechanisms for surveillance and social control. In this article, we analyze the phenomenon in which private individuals conduct surveillance on behalf of the state, often using private sector technologies to do so. We develop the concept ofsurveillance deputiesto describe when ordinary people, rather than state acto…
Access to justice at the intersection of civil and criminal law
The problem with criminal records: Discrepancies between state reports and private‐sector background checks
Criminal records are routinely used by employers and other institutional decision‐makers who rely on their presumed fidelity to evaluate applicants. We analyze criminal records for a sample of 101 people, comparing official state reports, two sources of private‐sector background checks (one regulated and one unregulated by federal law), and qualitative interviews. Based on our analysis, private‐sector background checks are laden with false‐positi…
The Stress of Injustice: Public Defenders and the Frontline of American Inequality
Fairness in the criminal legal system is unattainable without effective legal representation of indigent defendants, yet we know little about the experience of attorneys who do this critical work. Using semi-structured interviews, our study investigated occupational stress in a sample of 78 attorneys representing indigent clients across the United States. We show how the chronic stressors experienced at work culminate in what we define as the str…
This is everyone's issue”: Policy entrepreneurs, issue framing, and coalition building in the passage of automatic criminal record expungement
Research Summary Since 2018, at least 12 U.S. states have introduced policies to expunge certain eligible arrest and criminal conviction records through automated or algorithmic means. Drawing on interviews with governmental representatives and community stakeholders, this paper identifies strategies used to pass this legislation in Pennsylvania and Utah, the first two states to enact automated expungement policies. We frame our findings around t…
Political science (21 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Criminology (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (16 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Criminal record (11 works) · Business (8 works)