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 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.     

Sars And Regime Legitimacy In China

The Truth about the Chinese Republic. By H. G. Woodhead. London: Hurst and Blackett. 15s.

Peking to Lhasa: The Narrative of Journeys in the Chinese Empire made by the late Brigadier‐General George Pereira. Compiled by Sir Francis Younghusband. Constable. 18s. net.

In the Heart of Asia. By Lieut.‐Colonel P. T. Etherton. London: Constable and Co. 9 × 6½>. 305 pp. 16s.

Thro’ the Gates of Memory: From the Bosphorus to Baghdad. By Betty Cunliffe Owen. Messrs. Hutchinson and Co. 21s.

Four Centuries of Modern Iraq. By Stephen Helmsley Longrigg. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 21s.

Adventures in Turkey and Russia. By E. H. Keeling. John Murray, 1924. 10s. 6d.

Freie Wege Vergleichender Erdkunden. Von R. Oldenbourg, Munich and Berlin.     

Diversionary War and Argentina's Invasion of the Falkland Islands

The idea of “least likely” (or “hard”) and “most likely” cases with which to test theories has been addressed in many prominent works on qualitative methodology. Such research designs are especially common among those working in the field of security studies. Nevertheless, there exists considerable confusion regarding how these cases should be defined and how authors can draw sound inferences from them. At worst, such confusion leads to the impression that researchers apply the labels of least and most likely cases in an arbitrary fashion. This article advances two related rationales for categorizing cases as least or most likely, describing the necessary steps researchers should follow to employ them correctly. It incorporates literature from security studies to demonstrate the pitfalls that researchers may be vulnerable to without a precise idea of how least and most likely cases should be used.