A discussion with Yanilda María González
September 24, 2025
For the first event in our Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control speaker series, we are joined by Professor Yanilda González to discuss the popularity of punishment. Societies are structured around multiple forms of justice; one common form of justice is retributive justice: punishment for wrongdoing or for violating community norms. Retributive justice is different than a more colloquial understanding of vengeance; the high-minded premise of retributivism in criminal law systems is a considered and proportional response to harm meted out by a legal process with built-in checks and balances, including independence, procedural justice, and individualized assessments based on evidence proven in court. But where retributive justice is foundational to many criminal systems, even democracies can easily fall to more emotional and vengeful versions of retributivism. This becomes particularly dangerous terrain for authoritarian creep where charismatic leaders or powerful institutions can exploit existing popular opinion against disfavored behavior, disfavored people, or disempowered groups within societies. Drawing from her book, her prior publications, and forthcoming research on repression of marginalized groups in Brazil, Professor Yanilda González will join us to discuss comparative perspectives on how authoritarian regimes, and authoritarian institutions within democratic regimes, build or exploit support for punishment in order to concentrate their own power.
Speaker
Yanilda María González is the Ford Foundation Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on policing, state violence, and citizenship in democracy, examining how race, class, and other forms of inequality shape these processes. Her book Authoritarian Police in Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America (Cambridge University Press), studies the persistence of police forces as authoritarian enclaves in otherwise democratic states, demonstrating how ordinary democratic politics in unequal societies can both reproduce authoritarian policing and bring about rare moments of expansive reforms. She received her PhD in Politics and Social Policy from Princeton University. Prior to joining HKS she was an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. She previously worked at a number of human rights organizations in the US and Argentina, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, ANDHES, and Equipo Latinoaméricano de Justicia y Género.
Links to resources shared during the event
- Law enforcement at the margin of the law: Information provision and support for militarization in Mexico.
- The human costs of the war on drugs. Attitudes towards militarization of security in Mexico.
- The ‘Tough-on-Crime’ Left: Race, Gender, and Elections of Law and Order Democrats.
- The partisanship of mayors has no detectable effect on police spending, police employment, crime, or arrests.
- “What citizens can see of the state”: Police and the construction of democratic citizenship in Latin America.
The Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control speaker series is organized by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice (HKS); Faculty Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management; Professor of Sociology (FAS).