Criminal Records as Racialized Surveillance

• In Event: Surveillance in the Criminal Justice System & Society

Abstract

With few exceptions the literature on criminal records focuses on stigma, especially the negative effects on employment prospects for African-Americans. Drawing on three years of field work in a pardons assistance program in Delaware, the present study employs Browne's (2015) important work on racialized surveillance to argue that debates on criminal records must go beyond a narrow focus on stigma alone. Specifically, we use pardon seeker narratives to highlight how overcriminalization and ubiquitous background checks profoundly alter time and space in the lives of African-Americans. Pardon seekers describe work, retirement, home life, and encounters in various ordinary public spaces as profoundly disrupted by racially targeted policing practices. Such arrests and subsequent convictions--most that have occurred decades ago--resurface in background checks than deny employment, housing, and even volunteering opportunities. More than individual stigma alone, we argue that these encounters represent a kind of temporal violence in the already hyper-surveilled lifeworlds of African-Americans.

Authors

• Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, University of Delaware

• Jamie Longazel, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY