Criminal Records as Classification Situations

Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy developed the notion of "classification situations" to describe how ordinal schema that sort and rank individuals, like credit scores, are used to differentiate opportunities, prices, and services in ways that structure life chances while masking inequality as meritocratic. We argue that contemporary criminal records increasingly function as such classificatory tools. The proliferation of alternatives to traditional case processing and record-relief policies challenge the widely-held view of criminal records as binary markers of exclusion by revealing a system that is increasingly gradational, dynamic, and responsive to intervention. Drawing on examples from criminal law, policy, and the private market, we show how opportunities to mitigate or remediate criminal record marks are structured to reward those with greater social and material resources. We then test our theory using linked, individual-level administrative criminal record, education, and unemployment insurance wage data. Our findings illustrate how the severity of a criminal record is not necessarily based on factual guilt or culpability but rooted in social advantage.