Professor Reuben Jonathan Miller of the University of Chicago delivered CrimSL’s 27th annual Edwards Lecture, “The Least: Violence, the Vulnerable, and the Promise of Black Freedom for a New World,” to a standing-room-only audience on November 19, 2025, at U of T’s Jackman Humanities Building.
CrimSL Director Professor Kamari Clarke opened the event with welcoming remarks followed by CrimSL undergraduate students Charley McNeil and Breanna Lachmanen who gave a Land Acknowledgement and welcomed guests on behalf of the Criminology & Sociolegal Studies Students' Association (CRIMSA).
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Professor Clarke outlined the history of the Edwards Lecture and gave a preview of CrimSL’s latest alumni initiatives. She then introduced CrimSL’s Professor Scot Wortley, who offered another warm welcome and introduced Professor Miller.
There are few true optimists in this world, those who are acutely aware of the layers of injustice within systems and societies and yet fundamentally believe that change is possible, a kind of change that is possible, not just in the abstract sense, but in the human sense, meaning that it is achievable by all of us if we summon our common humanity. Professor Reuben Jonathan Miller is this kind of optimist.
- Professor Scot Wortley
Professor Reuben Jonathan Miller presented an engaging and informative lecture on the intersection of race, vulnerability, and violence around the world. He encouraged the audience to think critically on how we interact with the social world and with each other.
And the older I get, I'm wanting to imagine a world that doesn't respond to need with punishment at all. I came to understand that the vulnerable—vulnerability, perhaps—was the problem that we kept responding to with things like the prison.
Is this about violence at all, or is this about vulnerability? Is this about our hatred of the vulnerable, our disdain for the weak?
And if it is, which I think it is, then that means mass incarceration was an act of state-sanctioned community violence.
- Professor Reuben Jonathan Miller
Professor Miller’s lecture was followed by a Q & A session moderated by Wortley, offering the audience the opportunity to connect with and learn from Professor Miller further and share their own lived experiences.
Professor Clarke then joined Professor Miller at the podium to offer concluding remarks and her thanks before inviting everyone to enjoy the reception which concluded the evening. Professor Clarke presented Professor Miller with a gift of CrimSL swag.
Sponsors
This lecture was presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and cosponsored by U of T's Woodsworth College and The Henry N.R. Jackman Faculty of Law.
Watch the lecture
A video recording of the lecture and Q & A, complete with captions, description, and timings, has been posted on CrimSL's YouTube channel.
About Professor Jonathan Miller
Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School and in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. His research, which focuses on race, punishment, and social welfare policy is published in journals across the social sciences. In 2021, Miller published his first sole authored book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, which won a number of awards, including the 2023 Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology, the 2022 Herbert Jacob Book Prize from the Law and Society Association and two PROSE Awards from the Association of American Publisher’s, including the award for Excellence in Social Science. Halfway Home was also a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize for Current Affairs and the Pen America John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction. In 2022, Miller was selected as a MacArthur Fellow, the so called "genius award," with the prize committee noting that "Miller is modeling a way to write about his subjects that refuses to reduce them to their hardships, and he is illuminating how the American carceral system reshapes individuals' lives and relationships long after their time has been served.” He is currently conducting a transnational study of black emancipation in port cities along the transatlantic slave trade route and a study of violence and our responses to it.
About the John Ll. J. Edwards Memorial Lecture
The annual Edwards Memorial Lecture is delivered in honour of Professor John Llewellyn Jones Edwards, who founded the U of T Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies in 1963. See past Edwards Lectures here.