Prior research documents widespread deficiencies in the quality and completeness of official criminal records in the United States. In an era when the social reach of criminal records has expanded to an unprecedented degree, these deficiencies carry serious consequences for criminal record subjects. The present study develops the concept of punitive ambiguity to characterize the burdens of incomplete criminal records and examines how they vary at the state level, providing evidence that punitive ambiguity is racially patterned. Using data from the biennial Surveys of State Criminal History Information Systems, multivariate analyses find that states where African Americans make up larger shares of felony record populations report rap sheet dispositions at significantly lower levels, pairing low criminal record data quality with extensive legally-mandated background screening. The results carry implications for understanding the racialized burdens of a criminal record, as well as broader processes in the development of the American penal state that combine harsh formal punishments with chronic administrative neglect.
BehrensAUggenCManzaJ (2003)
Ballot manipulation and the ‘menace of negro domination': Racial threat and felon disenfranchisement in the United States, 1850–2002. American Journal of Sociology109(3): 559–605.
2.
BenjaminR (2019) Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim CodeMedford, MA:
Polity.
3.
BenzT (2019)
Toxic cities: Neoliberalism and environmental racism in flint and Detroit Michigan. Critical Sociology45(1): 49–62.
4.
BrayneS (2014)
Surveillance and system avoidance: Criminal justice contact and institutional attachment. American Sociological Review79(3): 367–391.
5.
BullardRWrightB (2012) The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities.
New York:
New York University Press.
6.
Bureau of Justice Statistics (1992) Report of the National task force on criminal history record disposition reporting. Available at: www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rntfchrdr.pdf (accessed 19 June 2020).
BushwaySDBriggsSTaxmanF, et al. (2007) Private providers of criminal history records: Do you get what you pay for? In: Stoll MA, Bushway SD and Weiman D (eds) Barriers to Reentry? The Labor Marker for Released Prisoners in Post Industrial America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp.174--200.
9.
California Department of Justice (2020) Fingerprint background checks. Available at: https://oag.ca.gov/fingerprints (accessed 29 December 2020).
10.
EwaldA (2012)
Collateral consequences in the American states. Social Science Quarterly93(1): 211–247.
11.
Fleury-SteinerBLongazelJ (2013) The Pains of Mass Imprisonment.
New York:
Routledge.
GarlandD (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society.
Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
14.
GarlandD (2013)
Penality and the penal state. Criminology51(3): 475–517.
15.
HaneyC (1998)
Riding the punishment wave: On the origins of our devolving standards of decency. Hastings Women’s Law Journal9(1): 27–78.
16.
JacobsDCarmichaelJT (2001)
The politics of punishment across time and space: A pooled time-series analysis of imprisonment rates. Social Forces80(1): 61–89.
17.
JacobsJ (2015) The Eternal Criminal Record.
Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
18.
KaufmanNKaiserJRumpfC (2018)
Beyond punishment: The penal state’s interventionist, covert, and negligent modalities of control. Law & Social Inquiry43(02): 468–495.
Kohler-HausmannI (2018) Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing.
Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
21.
KozolJ (1991) Savage Inequalities.
New York:
Crown.
22.
LagesonS (2016)
Found out and opting out: The consequences of online criminal records for families. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science665(1): 127–141.
23.
LagesonS (2020) Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data Driven Criminal Justice.
New York:
Oxford University Press.
24.
LagesonSVuoloMUggenC (2015)
Legal ambiguity in managerial assessments of criminal records. Law & Social Inquiry40(01): 175–204.
LoganWFergusonA (2016)
Policing criminal justice data. Minnesota Law Review101: 541–614.
27.
LynchM (2010) Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment.
Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
28.
MaddenMGilmanMLevyK, et al. (2017)
Privacy, poverty, and big data: A matrix of vulnerabilities for poor Americans. Washington University Law Review95(1): 53–125.
29.
McElhattanD (2018) “
$40 to make sure”: Background checks and the endogenous construction of criminal risk. Studies in LawPolitics, and Society77: 99–121.
30.
McNeillF (2019)
Mass supervision, misrecognition and the ‘malopticon’. Punishment & Society21(2): 207–230.
31.
MillerRStuartF (2017)
Carceral citizenship: Race, rights and responsibility in the age of mass supervision. Theoretical Criminology21(4): 532–548.
32.
MyrickA (2013)
Facing your criminal record: Expungement and the collateral problem of wrongfully represented self. Law & Society Review47(1): 73–104.
PagerD (2007) Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration.
Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
36.
PhelpsM (2012)
The place of punishment: Variation in the provision of inmate services staff across the punitive turn. Journal of Criminal Justice40(5): 348–357.
37.
PerkinsonR (2010) Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire.
New York:
Metropolitan Books.
38.
RosenblatAKneeseTBoydd (2014) Algorithmic Accountability. New York: Data & Society Research Institute.
39.
Search Group (1985) Data Quality of Criminal History Records.
Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.
SEARCH (2005b) Report of the National Task Force on the Commercial Sale of Criminal Justice Record Information. Available at: http://www.search.org/files/pdf/RNTFCSCJRI.pdf (accessed 19 June 2020).
SEARCH (2018) Survey of State Criminal History Information Systems, 2018.
Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.
44.
ShannonSKUggenCSchnittkerJ, et al. (2017)
The growth, scope, and spatial distribution of people with felony records in the United States, 1948–2010. Demography54(5): 1795–1818.
45.
SimonJ (2014) Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America.
New York:
The New Press.
46.
SugieNFZatzNDAugustineD (2020)
Employer aversion to criminal records: An experimental study of mechanisms. Criminology58(1): 5–34.
47.
TaylorK-Y (2019) Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.
Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press.
48.
UggenCVuoloMLagesonS, et al. (2014)
The edge of stigma: An experimental audit of the effects of low-level criminal records on employment. Criminology52(4): 627–654.
U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) (2015) Criminal history records: Additional actions could enhance the completeness of records used for employment-related background checks. Accessed Available at: www.gao.gov/assets/670/668505.pdf (accessed 23 June 2020).
