Position Title
Graduate Student
Education
- MA, University of California Davis, 2022
- JD, University of California Hastings College of the Law, 2019.
- BA, Sociology, University of California Los Angeles, 2013.
About
I’m Axl—a sociologist, legal scholar, and harm reductionist. My work explores how institutions like prisons, parole boards, and drug treatment systems govern people through ideas like dangerousness, rehabilitation, and addiction. As a formerly incarcerated reentry student, I bring an interdisciplinary lens shaped by both my lived experience and formal training in law and sociology.
Outside of academia, I organize with the National Coalition to Liberate Methadone, co-lead a leadership development group called We Are All Leaders, and co-founded the UC Davis chapter of Underground Scholars. I also love plant-based cooking and believe that care, compassion, and community are key to liberation.
Research Focus
My research is grounded in critical sociology, critical drug studies, and law & society scholarship. I focus on how systems of power classify, punish, and manage marginalized populations. Reaching across disciplines, I examine how carceral and medical institutions govern the lives of those labeled as risky, deviant, or in need of reform. Guided by a commitment to scholar-activism and liberatory harm reduction, my work centers the voices, knowledge, and resistance strategies of those most impacted by criminalization and surveillance. My current research projects can be divided into two broad topics:
1. Carceral Logics, Risk, and Rehabilitation
My research explores how institutions classify people as dangerous, deviant, or unworthy—and how those labels are used to justify social control. I study the legal, emotional, and bureaucratic frameworks that govern interactions within the criminal legal system. Prior and ongoing research looks explicitly at thousands of pages of parole hearing transcripts for marginalized or aging populations and asks why so few people are granted parole. This includes analyzing how concepts like “rehabilitation” and “risk” are socially constructed and unevenly applied based on gender, age, and race.
2. Drug Policy, Medicalization, and Harm Reduction
I investigate how addiction is governed at the intersection of healthcare and punishment. My work examines methadone treatment systems, drug-induced homicide laws, and the medical-legal regulation of drug use and pregnancy. I study how public health and criminal legal system policies often reproduce stigma, racialized punishment, and structural violence—while claiming to provide care. At the same time, I collaborate with harm reductionists and people who use drugs to document alternative forms of expertise, mutual aid, and resistance. This work aims to unsettle dominant narratives about addiction and to support liberatory models of health rooted in dignity, autonomy, and collective care.
Courses
Instructor
Health, Inequality, and the War on Drugs and Crime (First-Year Seminar)
UC Davis | 7 Quarters (2021–2024)
- Co-designed and co-taught an interdisciplinary seminar examining the intersections of public health, drug policy, and carceral logics. Students explored how social institutions construct and respond to addiction, risk, and crime, with a focus on stigma, harm reduction, and governance.
Teaching Assistant
I have over four years of TA experience at UC Davis across courses in sociology, health policy, and law, including:
- (Abolish) Criminology
- Sociology of Violence
- Juvenile Delinquency
- Sociology of Law
- Health Policy
- Self & Society
- Introduction to Sociology
Publications
Axl Campos Kaminski, The "Stunning" Reality Behind Halal Meat Production, 9 Environmental and Earth L.J. 32 (2019). Available at: https://lawpublications.barry.edu/ejejj/vol9/iss1/2.
Axl Campos Kaminski, A No-Win Situation: Pregnant Mothers in Medication Assisted Therapy Programs Face Discrimination for Following Doctors Orders, 30 Hastings Women's L.J. 143 (2019). Available at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/hwlj/vol30/iss1/7.