Sarah Lageson
Associate Professor of Criminology/Criminal Justice and Law
Education
University of Minnesota, MA 2012
University of Minnesota, PhD 2015
Rutgers Law School, JD 2023
Bio
Professor Sarah Lageson, an expert on technology, surveillance and data privacy in the criminal legal system, joined the Northeastern University community in 2025 as associate professor of criminology/criminal justice and law with the School of Law and the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice within the College of Social Sciences. She is an affiliated scholar at the American Bar Foundation and previously held appointments at Rutgers University-Newark School of Criminal Justice as an associate professor and with Columbia University’s Department of Sociology and Universitat Pompeu Fabra School of Law in Barcelona as a visiting scholar.
Millions of Americans are eligible to have old arrests or convictions cleared from their records, but most never get that relief because the process is too complex, costly or confusing to navigate. Professor Lageson leads a multi-state research initiative, funded by the Clean Slate Initiative, studying whether automatic (“Clean Slate”) expungement laws actually solve this problem. With colleagues at Santa Clara University and San Jose State University, she interviews and surveys people eligible for Clean Slate relief across five states; findings have been published in the Law and Society Review, Criminology and Public Policy and Criminal Justice and Behavior. With the University of Maryland, she is studying policy implementation as Minnesota rolls out its new Clean Slate law and has run Know Your Rights seminars with the Minnesota Justice Research Center. She has also worked with the Mills Institute’s Innovation Lab on Northeastern’s Oakland campus, where first-year undergraduates volunteered at legal aid clinics and analyzed client data to support local expungement efforts in California.
Professor Lageson’s empirical research has been published in peer reviewed journals, including Law & Society Review, Social Forces, Criminology and Law & Social Inquiry, and legal venues including Harvard Journal of Law & Technology and University of Illinois Law Review. Her book, Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice, was published by Oxford University Press and won awards from the American Society of Criminology, the Law and Society Association and the Privacy Law Scholars Conference. She holds a JD from Rutgers Law School, PhD and MA in sociology from the University of Minnesota and a BA from Washington University in St. Louis.
Fields of Expertise
- Criminal Justice Policy and Practice
- Criminal Law
- Law and Technology
- Privacy and Data Protection
- Technology
Selected Works
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- Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice (Oxford University Press, 2020).
- Give Methods a Chance (W.W. Norton, 2019) (co-author).
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- “Automating Administrative Burden in Algorithmic Criminal Record Expungement," Law and Society Review 1–27 (2026)
- “Criminal Data Function Creep,” 116 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 112 (2026).
- “The Mark or Trace of a Criminal Record: A Survey Experiment of Race and Criminal Record Signaling,” 63(2) Criminology 382 (co-author).
- “Digital Punishment, Lateral Surveillance and The Sex Offense Registry,” Punishment & Society (2025) (co-author).
- “This is Everyone’s Issue’: Policy Entrepreneurs, Issue Framing, and Coalition Building in the Passage of Automatic Criminal Record Expungement,” 24 Criminology & Public Policy 655 (2025) (co-author).
- “The Symbiotic Harms of a Criminal Record,” Criminal Justice and Behavior (2025) (co-author).
- “The Intersection of Cannabis Legalization, Criminal Record Relief, and Emerging Adulthood,” 22 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 235 (2025) (co-author).
- “Chasing a Clean Slate: The Shifting Roles of Privacy and Technology in Criminal Record Expungement Law and Policy,” 38 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 1 (2024) (co-author).
- “Criminally Bad Data: Inaccurate Criminal Records, Data Brokers, and Algorithmic Injustice,” 5 University of Illinois Law Review 1771 (2023) (co-author).
- “The Stress of Injustice: Public Defenders and the Frontline of American Inequality,” Social Forces (2024) (co-author).
- “The Problem with Criminal Records: Discrepancies Between Official State Records and Private Sector Background Checks,” Criminology (2024) (co-author).
- “Surveillance Deputies: When Ordinary People Surveil for the State,” 57 (4) Law & Society Review 462 (2023) (co-author).
- “Access to Justice at The Intersection of Civil and Criminal Law,” Punishment & Society (2024).
- “Digital Criminal Record Stigma and Surveillance,” 5 Annual Review of Criminology 67 (2022).
- “Digitizing and Disclosing Personal Data: The Proliferation of State Criminal Records on the Internet” 46(3) Law &
Social Inquiry 635 (2021) (co-author). - “Disordered Punishment: Workaround Technologies of Criminal Records Disclosure and the Rise of a New Penal Entrepreneurialism,” 60(2) British Journal of Criminology 245 (2020) (co-author).
- “Fighting the Good Fight: Why Do Public Defenders Remain on the Job?,” 31 Criminal Justice Policy Review 939 (2020) (co-author).
- “Privacy Loss as Collateral Consequence,” The Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research 9:16-31 (2020).
- “Privatizing Criminal Stigma: Experience, Intergroup Contact, and Public Views about Publicizing Arrest Records,” 21(3) Punishment & Society 315 (2019) (co-author).
- “Gendered Public Support for Criminalizing ‘Revenge Porn,’” 14(5) Feminist Criminology 560 (2019) (co-author).
- “Digital Degradation: Stigma Management in the Internet Age,” 20(1) Punishment & Society 113 (2018) (co-author).
- “The Politics of Public Punishment,” 17(3) Criminology & Public Policy 635.
- “Crime Data, the Internet, and Free Speech: An Evolving Legal Consciousness.” Law & Society Review 51(1):8-41 (2017).
- “Criminal Record Questions in the Era of ‘Ban the Box,’” 16(1) Criminology & Public Policy 139 (2017) (co-author).
- “Race, Recession, and Social Closure in the Low Wage Labor Market: Experimental and Observational Evidence,” 30 Research in the Sociology of Work 141 (2017).
- “Found Out and Opting Out: The Consequences of Online Criminal Records for Families,” 665(1) The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 127 (2016).
- “Digital Punishment’s Tangled Web,” 15(1) Contexts 22 (2017).
- “Statistical Power in Experimental Audit Studies: Cautions and Calculations for Paired Tests with Dichotomous Outcomes.” 45(2) Sociological Methods & Research 260 (2016) (co-author).
- “Legal Ambiguity in Managerial Assessments of Criminal Records.” 40(1) Law and Social Inquiry 175 (2015).
- “The Edge of Stigma: An Experimental Audit of the Effects of Low-level Criminal Records on Employment.” 52(4) Criminology 627 (2014) Cco-author).
- “Taste Clusters of Music and Drugs: Evidence from Three Analytical Levels.” 65(3) British Journal of Sociology 520 (2014) (co-author).
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- “Who Gets a Clean Slate? Northeastern Research Reveals Gaps in California’s Expungement System,” Northeastern Global News (June 22, 2026)
- “Unlocking the Full Promise of Clean Slate: New Research on Automation and Opportunity,” The Clean Slate Initiative (March 27, 2026)
- “Professor Sarah Lageson Awarded Dual Grants to Study the Real-World Impact of Clean Slate Expungement Policies,” Northeastern Law News Announcement (April 30, 2025).
Sarah Lageson
Associate Professor of Criminology/Criminal Justice and Law
Contact
- [email protected]