Militarization, Policing, and Imprisonment Across Borders

A discussion with Michelle Brown and Rebecca Gordon

In the third session of our Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control series, we’ll look at histories in the United States of using law and politics at home and abroad to perpetuate occupation, colonization, and social control through criminalization. Our speakers will discuss how efforts to expand presidential power more than two decades ago under the George W. Bush administration inform and intersect with the processes of detention and deportation we are seeing today. We will examine how the language, logics, and legal regime around the “War on Terror” may enable military occupation of U.S. cities for the purported purpose of crime control. We will consider how the push for more extreme forms of detention and punishment – from exploitation at Abu Ghraib to legal justifications for the use of torture and extraordinary rendition – provide a template for continuing to move the goalposts on use of force by U.S. state actors, and to blur boundaries between tactics utilized in wartime abroad and domestic enforcement agendas. Finally, we will explore how these processes connect to a longer legacy of occupation and colonization against Native Americans and how communities are cultivating power to counteract violence workers and to develop their own ways to conceive and maintain safety.

Speakers

Michelle Brown is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee and Co-Director of the Appalachian Justice Research Center. She is a criminologist and sociolegal scholar with a joint PhD in Criminal Justice and American Studies. Her research and teaching areas include abolition and emergent forms of justice; carceral studies; law & society; and media, theory, and digital culture. Her work focuses on the rise of the carceral state and attendant social movements directed at ending mass incarceration, building more effective forms of community safety, and shifting media narratives on crime and punishment. Brown is the author of The Culture of Punishment (NYUP); co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture, the Palgrave MacMillan Crime, Media and Culture Book Series, and she is the former editor of the leading journal on crime and media: Crime Media Culture. She was named Critical Criminologist of the Year in 2016 by the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice of the American Society of Criminology. She is a first generation student: an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation (Tahlequah, OK) and of English-Scottish descent, with deep lineages in Appalachia on both sides of her family.

Rebecca Gordon received her B.A. from Reed College and her M.Div. and Ph.D. in Ethics and Social Theory from Graduate Theological Union. She teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of San Francisco and for the university’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good. Previous publications include Letters From Nicaragua and Cruel and Usual: How Welfare “Reform” Punishes Poor People. Her latest book is American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. She publishes regularly at Tomdispatch.com, a project of The Nation Institute. Prior to teaching at USF, Rebecca spent many years as an activist in a variety of movements, including for women's and LGBTQ+ liberation, the Central America and South Africa solidarity movements and for racial justice in the United States. Her courses focus on issues of war and peace, justice and collective responsibility, asking each other how we can "change the world from here." Students will deal with serious subjects with passion, rigor, and humor.

This event was recorded on October 15, 2025.

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).

Links to resources mentioned during the discussion can be found on our website: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/w...