A presentation by Sarah Lageson, PhD hosted The Justice, Law, & Inequality Working Group

This presentation provides empirical details examining how private data companies use flawed criminal justice data, creating "automated injustices" that harm employment and housing opportunities. The research finds that even automatic expungement laws fail to remove records from private databases, perpetuating systemic inequalities.

Sarah Lageson is a social scientist and lawyer who researches and writes about data privacy, the U.S. criminal legal system, surveillance, technology, and automation/AI. Dr. Lageson is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and the School of Law at Northeastern University, as well as an Affiliated Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. Her 2020 book, Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice is the recipient of the Michael J. Hindelang award, which recognizes an outstanding contribution to research in criminology and has been featured in the New York Times, the Guardian, National Public Radio’s Planet Money, WNYC’s The Takeaway, and other media outlets. Dr. Lageson’s research has been published in Criminology, Social Forces, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Punishment & Society, the Annual Review of Criminology, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, among other outlets. Her public writing about issues related to law and technology has appeared in the Washington Post, Wired, Slate, Vice, The Appeal, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Conversation.  She received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Minnesota and a JD from Rutgers Law School, where she interned at the New York Office of the Appellate Defender and the New York Legal Assistance Group’s Pro Se Clinic at the Southern District of New York, and the Rutgers Expungement Law Project. Before academia, Dr. Lageson was an Americorps VISTA and worked in the nonprofit sector.