Facing Your Criminal Record: Expungement and the Collateral Problem of Wrongfully Represented Self.

While substantial sociolegal research has analyzed the deleterious effects of criminal records on life outcomes, little has examined the records themselves, or their relationship to the people they represent. In this article I take a novel tact, treating criminal records as the material, textual doc...

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Publicado en:Law & Society Review Vol. 47; no. 1; pp. 73 - 105
Autor principal: Myrick, Amy
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Cambridge University Press Mar2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        United States
        Criminal records
        Arrest
        Symbolic interactionism
        Depersonalization
        Group identity
        Criminal justice system
        Criminal justice system & ethics
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          Criminal records
          Arrest
          Symbolic interactionism
          Depersonalization
          Group identity
          Criminal justice system
          Criminal justice system & ethics
          United States
          Other Justice, Public Order, and Safety Activities
      ab: While substantial sociolegal research has analyzed the deleterious effects of criminal records on life outcomes, little has examined the records themselves, or their relationship to the people they represent. In this article I take a novel tact, treating criminal records as the material, textual documentations of an individual's past. I then observe expungement seekers-people who encounter their own records-to understand their reactions. From this data, I use inductive theories of symbolic interactionism to theorize another collateral effect of the criminal record: it represents people in ways that depersonalize their social identities, and prevents them from communicating corrective self-understandings to the governing bodies that author the records. I conclude with my main theoretical contribution: 'having a criminal record,' literally, means having a textual proxy that the state has authored on its own terms, without input from the people whom it permanently represents, and while concealing from those people the apparatus behind authorship. As a consequence, the criminal records system serves as a barrier to reciprocal communication between ex-arrestees and a legal system that represents them in ways that they may want to contest. This 'wrongful representation' is a collateral effect of having a criminal record that impedes the ability of ex-arrestees to manage or repair their relationship with the state that has punished them.
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    language: English
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