Is It Easy to Represent Self in Court for Expungement
journal article
Law & Society Review
, pp. 73-104 (32 pages)
Published By: Wiley
https://www. jstor .org/stable/23357931
With a personal account, you can read up to 100 articles each month for free.
Already have an account?
- Access everything in the JPASS collection
- Read the full-text of every article
- Download up to 10 article PDFs to save and keep
- Access everything in the JPASS collection
- Read the full-text of every article
- Download up to 120 article PDFs to save and keep
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.
Founded in 1966, Law & Society Review is regarded by sociolegal scholars worldwide as a leading journal in the field. The Review is a peer-reviewed publication for scholarship bearing on the relationship between society and the legal process, including articles or notes of interest to the research community in general, new theoretical developments, results of empirical studies, and reviews and comments on the field or its methods of inquiry. Broadly interdisciplinary, the Review welcomes work from any tradition of scholarship concerned with the cultural, economic, political, psychological, or social aspects of law and legal systems. JSTOR provides a digital archive of the print version of Law and Society Review. The electronic version of Law and Society Review is available at http://www.interscience.wiley.com. Authorized users may be able to access the full text articles at this site.
Wiley is a global provider of content and content-enabled workflow solutions in areas of scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly research; professional development; and education. Our core businesses produce scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly journals, reference works, books, database services, and advertising; professional books, subscription products, certification and training services and online applications; and education content and services including integrated online teaching and learning resources for undergraduate and graduate students and lifelong learners. Founded in 1807, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has been a valued source of information and understanding for more than 200 years, helping people around the world meet their needs and fulfill their aspirations. Wiley has published the works of more than 450 Nobel laureates in all categories: Literature, Economics, Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Peace. Wiley has partnerships with many of the world's leading societies and publishes over 1,500 peer-reviewed journals and 1,500+ new books annually in print and online, as well as databases, major reference works and laboratory protocols in STMS subjects. With a growing open access offering, Wiley is committed to the widest possible dissemination of and access to the content we publish and supports all sustainable models of access. Our online platform, Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) is one of the world's most extensive multidisciplinary collections of online resources, covering life, health, social and physical sciences, and humanities.
This item is part of a JSTOR Collection.
For terms and use, please refer to our
Law & Society Review © 2013 Law and Society Association
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23357931
0 Response to "Is It Easy to Represent Self in Court for Expungement"
Post a Comment