Data-driven criminal justice operations have led to the transformation of criminal records into millions of data points. These records are publicly disclosed on the internet, commodified into valuable big data, and leveraged against people. In Digitial Punishment, Sarah Lageson demonstrates the consequences this system has for people, society, and public policy.
The proliferation of 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 by law enforcement and courts, posted on government websites, re-posted on social media, online news and mugshot galleries, and bought and sold by data brokers. The result is "digital punishment," where mere suspicion or a brush with the law can have lasting consequences. In Digital Punishment, Sarah Esther Lageson unpacks criminal recordkeeping in the digital age, as busy and overburdened criminal justice agencies turned to technological solutions offered by IT companies over the last two decades. These operations produce a mountain of data, including the names, photographs, and home addresses of people arrested or charged with a crime, transforming millions of paper records into a digital commodity. Regardless of factual or legal guilt, these records rapidly multiply across the private sector background checking and personal data industries. Emboldened by public records laws designed for paper-based systems, criminal record data has become an extremely valuable resource for employers, landlords, and communities to monitor criminal behavior and assess other people. But while transparency laws were originally designed to allow governmental watchdogging, digital punishment has redirected our gaze toward one another. Hundreds of interviews detailed in this book reveal the consequences of digital punishment, as people purposefully opt out of society to cope with privacy and due process violations. As criminal histories impact nearly every aspect of private and civic life, the collateral consequences of even the most minor records are much more than barriers to employment and housing. For the criminal record-holder, the messy entanglement of government bureaucracy is nothing compared to the jurisdiction-less haze of the internet. Drawing on empirical data, interviews, and review of case law, this book powerfully demonstrates that addressing digital punishment will require a direct acknowledgement of privacy and dignity in the context of public accusation, and a reckoning of how rehabilitation can actually occur in a society that never forgets.
Crime and Punishment in the Future Internet is an examination of the development and impact of digital frontier technologies (DFTs) such as Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of things, autonomous mobile robots, and blockchain on offending, crime control, the criminal justice system, and the discipline of criminology. It poses criminological, legal, ethical, and policy questions linked to such development and anticipates the impact of DFTs on crime and offending. It forestalls their wide-ranging consequences, including the proliferation of new types of vulnerability, policing and other mechanisms of social control, and the threat of pervasive and intrusive surveillance. Two key concerns lie at the heart of this volume. First, the book investigates the origins and development of emerging DFTs and their interactions with criminal behaviour, crime prevention, victimisation, and crime control. It also investigates the future advances and likely impact of such processes on a range of social actors: citizens, non-citizens, offenders, victims of crime, judiciary and law enforcement, media, NGOs. This book does not adopt technological determinism that suggests technology alone drives social development. Yet, while it is impossible to know where the emerging technologies are taking us, there is no doubt that DFTs will shape the way we engage with and experience criminal behaviour in the twenty-first century. As such, this book starts the conversation about a range of essential topics that this expansion brings to social sciences, and begins to decipher challenges we will be facing in the future. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to those engaged with criminology, sociology, politics, policymaking, and all those interested in the impact of DFTs on the criminal justice system.
The death of Samantha Grey’s mother and imprisonment of her father made her shut everyone out of her life. Including him. Ten years later, the murder of her father brings them back together and now Detective Nate Evans has two mysteries on his hands: a murder to solve and a past of questions that still gnaw at the surface to face. A past he’s tried hard to bury. One that includes her. As Nate and Samantha are forced to work together to bring justice for the dead, it is clear the case is not the only mystery being unearthed between them. They are led down dark, township alleyways, towards drug-dealer territory, and into the box of a decade old cold case… but how long will they take to realize how deep the roots of this case go? Neither of them are prepared for the trials they face as they start digging through Samantha’s twisted family history and exposing the cost of hidden truths. Will the collision of the past and present destroy what little faith they have in finding healing, or will it be the key to solving the decade old mysteries between them and finding redemption in the chaos? Emily Hart is a young South African author. She’s been involved in humanitarian work in the Middle East and half a dozen African countries, meeting people and seeing places that inspire her writing. Emily lives in Stellenbosch with her family and five chickens.
Punishment, Probation and Parole brings together leading scholars to explore the various dimensions and emerging concepts of community-based penalties and models for their future.
Punishment is a topic of increasing importance for citizens and policymakers. Why should we punish criminals? Which theory of punishment is most compelling? Is the death penalty ever justified? These questions and many more are examined in this highly engaging and accessible guide. Punishment is a critical introduction to the philosophy of punishment, offering a new and refreshing approach that will benefit readers of all backgrounds and interests. The first comprehensive critical guide to examine all leading contemporary theories of punishments, this book explores – among others – retribution, the communicative theory of punishment, restorative justice and the unified theory of punishment. Thom Brooks applies these theories to several case studies in detail, including capital punishment, juvenile offending and domestic violence. Punishment highlights the problems and prospects of different approaches in order to argue for a more pluralistic and compelling perspective that is novel and ground-breaking. This second edition has extensive revisions and updates to all chapters, including an all-new chapter on the unified theory substantively redrafted and new chapters on cyber-crimes and social media as well as corporate crimes. Punishment is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy, criminal justice, criminology, justice studies, law, political science and sociology.
The practice of mass incarceration has come under increasing criticism by criminologists and corrections experts who, nevertheless, find themselves at a loss when it comes to offering credible, practical, and humane alternatives. In Civilization and Barbarism, Graeme R. Newman argues this impasse has arisen from a refusal to confront the original essence of punishment, namely, that in some sense it must be painful. He begins with an exposition of the traditional philosophical justifications for punishment and then provides a history of criminal punishment. He shows how, over time, the West abandoned short-term corporal punishment in favor of longer-term incarceration, justifying a massive bureaucratic prison complex as scientific and civilized. Newman compels the reader to confront the biases embedded in this model and the impossibility of defending prisons as a civilized form of punishment. A groundbreaking work that challenges the received wisdom of "corrections," Civilization and Barbarism asks readers to reconsider moderate corporal punishment as an alternative to prison and, for the most serious offenders, forms of incapacitation without prison. The book also features two helpful appendixes: a list of debating points, with common criticisms and their rebuttals, and a chronology of civilized punishments.
This edited book promotes and facilitates cybercrime research by providing a cutting-edge collection of perspectives on the critical usage of online data across platforms, as well as the implementation of both traditional and innovative analysis methods. The accessibility, variety and wealth of data available online presents substantial opportunities for researchers from different disciplines to study cybercrimes and, more generally, human behavior in cyberspace. The unique and dynamic characteristics of cyberspace often demand cross-disciplinary and cross-national research endeavors, but disciplinary, cultural and legal differences can hinder the ability of researchers to collaborate. This work also provides a review of the ethics associated with the use of online data sources across the globe. The authors are drawn from multiple disciplines and nations, providing unique insights into the value and challenges evident in online data use for cybercrime scholarship. It is a key text for researchers at the upper undergraduate level and above.
Early nineteenth-century American prisons followed one of two dominant models: the Auburn system, in which prisoners performed factory-style labor by day and were placed in solitary confinement at night, and the Pennsylvania system, where prisoners faced 24-hour solitary confinement for the duration of their sentences. By the close of the Civil War, the majority of prisons in the United States had adopted the Auburn system - the only exception was Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, making it the subject of much criticism and a fascinating outlier. Using the Eastern State Penitentiary as a case study, The Deviant Prison brings to light anxieties and other challenges of nineteenth-century prison administration that helped embed our prison system as we know it today. Drawing on organizational theory and providing a rich account of prison life, the institution, and key actors, Ashley T. Rubin examines why Eastern's administrators clung to what was increasingly viewed as an outdated and inhuman model of prison - and what their commitment tells us about penal reform in an era when prisons were still new and carefully scrutinized.
The proliferation of 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 by law enforcement and courts, posted on government websites, re-posted on social media, online news and mugshot galleries, and bought and sold by data brokers. The result is "digital punishment," where mere suspicion or a brush with the law can have lasting consequences. In Digital Punishment, Sarah Esther Lageson unpacks criminal recordkeeping in the digital age, as busy and overburdened criminal justice agencies turned to technological solutions offered by IT companies over the last two decades. These operations produce a mountain of data, including the names, photographs, and home addresses of people arrested or charged with a crime, transforming millions of paper records into a digital commodity. Regardless of factual or legal guilt, these records rapidly multiply across the private sector background checking and personal data industries. Emboldened by public records laws designed for paper-based systems, criminal record data has become an extremely valuable resource for employers, landlords, and communities to monitor criminal behavior and assess other people. But while transparency laws were originally designed to allow governmental watchdogging, digital punishment has redirected our gaze toward one another. Hundreds of interviews detailed in this book reveal the consequences of digital punishment, as people purposefully opt out of society to cope with privacy and due process violations. As criminal histories impact nearly every aspect of private and civic life, the collateral consequences of even the most minor records are much more than barriers to employment and housing. For the criminal record-holder, the messy entanglement of government bureaucracy is nothing compared to the jurisdiction-less haze of the internet. Drawing on empirical data, interviews, and review of case law, this book powerfully demonstrates that addressing digital punishment will require a direct acknowledgement of privacy and dignity in the context of public accusation, and a reckoning of how rehabilitation can actually occur in a society that never forgets.