Book review: Punishment and Citizenship: A Theory of Criminal Disenfranchisement

Abstract

to mitigate, undo, or simply manage the harms of these commodified records. She shows how disengagement from the internet is as much a strategy to deal with the harms of digital punishment as overt resistance is. Similarly, for states and corporate actors, Lageson shows the importance of choices made and of passivity in allowing this business model to thrive and harms to persist The focus here may be specifically American, but Digital Punishment shares terrain with other recent works on power, society, and technology – such as Tyler’s (2021) Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality or Zuboff’s (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It is a book which will be useful to anyone researching, teaching, or studying topics such as criminal records, CJS bureaucracy, data-driven justice, and of course stigma. Lageson demonstrates convincingly how the datafication of criminal justice has served to extend punishment via a business model of surveillance, shaming, and stigma.