Our Fall 2025 speaker series will explore the relationship between criminalization, criminal punishment bureaucracies, and authoritarian control. We will examine these topics through multiple lenses and perspectives, domestic and international, historical and contemporary. We’ll explore questions about the preconditions of authoritarianism, and how authoritarian regimes use narratives of crime and punishment, as well enforcement of criminal or quasi-criminal violations, to target marginalized groups and punish dissent. We’ll examine how states wield power to name and define conduct, or groups, as criminal and attempt to understand the politics of criminalization within the politics of authoritarian control. We’ll also take a deep dive into histories of punishment, exclusion, and legal regimes of racialized social control and xenophobia in the United States in an effort to understand how U.S. history forecasts and grounds emerging trends in patterns of arrest, detention, imprisonment, and deportation. Finally, we’ll feature speakers working to develop toolkits to name, shame, and uproot the use of criminalization in public policy as a tool of social harm, deprivation, and destruction.
Recordings of previous events have been posted on our website on individual event pages (with links to resources) as well as on our YouTube channel.
Session 1: The Popularity of Punishment
September 24, 2025
- Yanilda González, Harvard Kennedy School
Session 2: Policing Borders and the Designation of Enemies Within
October 8, 2025
- Naomi Roht-Arriaza, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco
Session 3: Exporting and Importing: Militarization, Policing, and Imprisonment Across Borders
October 15, 2025
- Michelle Brown, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
- Rebecca Gordon, University of San Francisco
Session 4: Police Power in Building Authoritarian and Social Control
October 29, 2025
- Stuart Schrader, Johns Hopkins University
Session 5: The Development of Police in the U.S.: Suppressing and Stoking Racial and Class Conflicts
November 5, 2025
- Julian Go, University of Chicago
Session 6: Counterterrorism and the Targeting of Political Opponents
November 19, 2025
- Azadeh Shahshahani, Project South
- Raqib Hameed Naik, Center for the Study of Organized Hate
Session 7: Political Repression and Criminalization in China
December 3, 2025
- Jennifer Pan, Stanford University
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).