Jonathan Simon
Biographic Data
| ID | 187709 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Simon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Simon |
| SIGNATURE | SIMON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3622-3842 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 96 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 303 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 94 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Five Legal-Rational Myths of Punitive War and the Carceral State
This Article is concerned with the symbolic narratives that have historically been used to justify punitive war, defined as the use of force to punish the violation of international norms, justified on behalf of the international community. Ostensibly, punishment as a legitimate cause for war has been proscribed in the modern international legal order, yet punitive violence has not been excised from international politics. This Article builds on …
Dignity Defied
A decade ago, it seemed that America’s punitive system of mass incarceration was on the precipice of a transformation, stimulated by a legitimacy crisis as great as any in a century. A decade later, far more modest steps toward reform have been accomplished, and mass incarceration in the United States has proven stubbornly resilient. While overall imprisonment rates are modestly lower, there is little evidence of improving prison conditions or a …
Guns as a Civic Tool Kit
In Merchants of the Right, sociologist Jennifer Carlson explores the role of gun sellers as political interpreters that have helped promote a civic toolkit of ways to know and act on our uncertain political world, one that heavily favors right-wing policies. Guns, in brief, are not only a potentially lethal instrument of violence but also a framework for identifying one's location and political interests in a complex landscape. The pandemic year …
Scientific and social progress
Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics
This book is a treat, a collection of essays about the relationship between consciousness and quantum mechanics that is guaranteed to move the needle: serious, original, and relatively accessible. The essays develop cutting-edge views by thought-leading authors on questions that matter for the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of mind, and while to follow along you need to know what supervenience is and what an eigenstate is, the majority …
Great expectations
Ron Dudai, Penality in the Underground
Une occupation rurale du second âge du Fer et du Haut-Empire sur le site de l’aérodrome à Chartres (Eure-et-Loir)
Un établissement rural du second âge du Fer et de l’époque romaine a été mis au jour sur le site de l’aérodrome à Chartres.Lors de la première phase de son occupation, datée du Hallstatt final ou de La Tène ancienne, il comprend seulement quelques structures dont un probable enclos. L’organisation du site est difficile à cerner, compte tenu du peu de vestiges mis au jour. La présence d’un petit cellier indique une occupation relativement pérenne …
What we publish in Metascience
Knowing What We Want
Human dignity as a value to guide criminal justice reform emerged strikingly in the 2011 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata. But with Justice Kennedy retired and courts generally reluctant to go far down the road to practical reforms, its future lies in the political realm shaping policy at the local, state, and national levels. For human dignity to be effective politically and in forming policy, we need a vocabulary robust enough to convey…
Dignity and its discontents
As we approach the decade anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata (2011), it is perhaps a good time to take stock of some of the optimism expressed by this author (Simon, 2014) that the landmark prisoners’ rights decision, with its stark condemnation of the toxic combination of chronic illness, medical neglect, and overcrowding so typical of American prison systems in the era of mass incarceration, and its rhetorical invigo…
Disease diagnosis and treatment; could theranostics change everything
The anatomy of gender
The philosophers’ stone
Dr. James’s Fever Powder and other Georgian remedies
Exclusion and Extraction
Sandra Susan Smith a, Jonathan Simon b, Exclusion and Extraction: Criminal Justice Contact and the Reallocation of Labor, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 1, The Criminal Justice System as a Labor Market Institution (March 2020), pp. 1-27
Criminal law in an age of mass incarceration
After reviewing a great deal of ground opened up by Vincent Chiao’s version of the public law approach to criminal law, I will explore my biggest reservation, which is that, even with Chiao’s significant effort to recontextualize the role of criminal law and place a heavy burden of proof against criminalization in the conditions of modern societies, it still leaves too much room for the powerful irrational forces that drive punitiveness in societ…
Code Red
Police Abolitionist Discourse? Why It Has Been Missing (and Why It Matters)
[T]here is no penitentiary system without general surveillance; no carceral confinement without control of the population.
Retrospectives
Although maybe not the most fashionable area of study today, French science has a secure place in the classical canon of the history of science. Like the Scientific Revolution and Italian science at the beginning of the seventeenth century, French science, particularly eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century French science, remains a safe, albeit conservative, bet in terms of history-of-science teaching and research. The classic trope of …
Discretionary Justice
In bringing parole and pardon into a common study, Discretionary Justice breaks important new ground. It is also one of the most comprehensive historical studies of penal change, taking us from the birth of the prison to the establishment of parole and the indeterminate sentence. In examining the power to reprieve in one state, New York, during this long arc from the scaffold to the modern penal bureaucracy, Carolyn Strange provides a rich opport…
The Hard Problem of the Many
Danger, Crime and Rights
This article is a transcript of a conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon in San Francisco in October 1983. It has never previously been published and is transcribed on the basis of a tape recording made at the time. Foucault and Simon begin with a discussion of Foucault's 1977 lecture 'About the Concept of the 'Dangerous Individual' in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry', and move to a discussion of notions of danger, psychiatric expe…
Architecture and Justice
The New Gaol
Since John Howard’s (1777) condemnation of local places of detention at the end of the eighteenth century, the goal of prison reform has been to replace local jails with their porous boundaries and mixes of troubled citizens, with austere and complete “total institutions.” The current crisis of mass imprisonment is an opportune moment to rethink this strategy. In particular, California’s Correctional Realignment law represents a provocative count…
The `Society of Captives' in the Era of Hyper-Incarceration
Forty years after the publication of Gresham Sykes's Society of Captives and the second edition of Donald Clemmer's The Prison Community (1958) the incarcerated population in the US, now over 2 million, has grown to an unprecedented size, but paradoxically attention to and concern with the social order of prisons in US academic and political discourse has declined. Just when the experience of imprisonment is becoming a normal pathway for signific…
Refugees in a Carceral Age
Research Article| September 01 1998 Refugees in a Carceral Age: The Rebirth of Immigration Prisons in the United States Jonathan Simon Jonathan Simon Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1998) 10 (3): 577–607. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10-3-577 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan Simon; Refugees in a Carceral Age: The Rebirth of Imm…
Megan's Law
To an unprecedented degree American society at the turn of the twentieth century is governed through crime. Nearly three percent of adults are in the custody of the correctional system. Crime and fear of crime enter into a large part of the fundamental decisions in life: where to live, how to raise your family, where to locate your business, where and when to shop, and so on. The crime victim has become the veritable outline of a new form of poli…
Managing the monstrous
Sex offenders were once taken to be exemplary of the underlying psychopathological basis of crime. Today their significance is very different. Rather than occasions for testing our modernist faith in scientific rationality, they have become a lesson in the intransigence of evil. Recent laws aimed at addressing sex offenders reflect a transformation in the penal process that has been called the “new penology.” This new penology sees crime as a pro…
Mass Incarceration on Trial
Rise of the Carceral State
Poor Discipline
Reversal of Fortune
During the 1970s, the enterprise of individual risk assessment in the criminal justice system came under sharp attack from a number of angles, including legal, political, and empirical. A particularly acute site of this controversy was the use of psychological expertise to make individual risk assessments of persons with mental illness who found themselves within the criminal justice system. Successful court challenges to the procedures under whi…
Understanding Prison Policy and Population Trends
American incarceration numbers increased fivefold between 1973 and 1997. Changes in penal policies and practices, not changes in crime rates, are the primary explanation, but there is disagreement about the causes of penal policy changes. Two prevalent explanations are that rising crime rates led to public demand for harsher policies and that politicians used crime policy to exacerbate public fears and win electoral favor. Both have merit but eit…
Do these prisons make me look fat
Various observers have raised the question of how our penal appetite relates to broader patterns of consumption in western societies. Most recently, Ian Loader (2009) has suggested that our appetite for punishment, much like our appetite for ice cream and other high-calorie foods, has been accelerated by broad cultural and policy developments and queried how we might develop strategies to moderate it. The relationship is not simply metaphorical. …
In the Place of the Parent
Exclusion and Extraction
Sandra Susan Smith a, Jonathan Simon b, Exclusion and Extraction: Criminal Justice Contact and the Reallocation of Labor, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 1, The Criminal Justice System as a Labor Market Institution (March 2020), pp. 1-27
Danger, Crime and Rights
This article is a transcript of a conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon in San Francisco in October 1983. It has never previously been published and is transcribed on the basis of a tape recording made at the time. Foucault and Simon begin with a discussion of Foucault's 1977 lecture 'About the Concept of the 'Dangerous Individual' in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry', and move to a discussion of notions of danger, psychiatric expe…
Fear and Loathing in Late Modernity
Mass imprisonment is based in some way on the intense fear of crime in the United States but how should we think about this fear? Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) provided a productive framework for examining the relationship between social organization and risk selection in their path-breaking study of environmentalism. Douglas and Wildavsky argued that the contemporary obsession with pollution risk indicated a drift in society toward sectarian form…
From the Big House to the Warehouse
"The Long Walk Home" to Politics
W th the Supreme Court now in the hands of seven solidly conservative justices, liberals face a long walk home to the political activism which they participated in during the 1950s and 1960s. Along the way they may find Gerald Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope a sobering review of the last generation during which litigation rather than activism became the major channel for pursuing liberal goals. In lengthy case studies of school desegregation and abor…
How Our Days Became Numbered
Dan Bouk's study of the cultural dimensions of the life insurance industry in early twentieth-century America had my attention from its opening paragraphs describing the key scene in my favorite film noir, Double Indemnity (1944). In the scene, the crusty, older insurance claims manager, played by Edward G. Robinson, is reeling off statistics on train deaths to undergird his suspicion that a recent life insurance claim for an insured who died fal…
Dignity Defied
A decade ago, it seemed that America’s punitive system of mass incarceration was on the precipice of a transformation, stimulated by a legitimacy crisis as great as any in a century. A decade later, far more modest steps toward reform have been accomplished, and mass incarceration in the United States has proven stubbornly resilient. While overall imprisonment rates are modestly lower, there is little evidence of improving prison conditions or a …
Beyond the Panopticon
In the 1970s and the 1980s, the role of the prison in modern society was seared into the imagination of the humanities by Michel Foucault’s treatment of the prison in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; his genealogy of the modern “soul.” At a time when the social sciences had little to say about the nature of imprisonment as a specific historical practice (rather than a problem of social organization), the humanities helped define th…
Between Power and Knowledge
The forthcoming publication in English of Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy by Jürgen Habermas comes at a time when the nature and role of legal studies in the United States is being problematized. In both law schools and in the broader scientific and humanistic discussion of law (the totality of which, for the sake of brevity, I call legal studies), the consensus of more than a generation is breaki…
L' attirail d'un magicien rangé dans une cave de Chartres/Autricum
En juillet 2005, un brûle-encens portant une inscription magique en latin et des vases décorés de serpents sont fortuitement découverts à Chartres. La fouille d'urgence qui a suivi a mis au jour un ensemble d'objets liés à la pratique de la magie, cachés dans la petite cave d'une domus détruite par un incendie au tournant du ier-iie s. apr. J.-C.Cet ensemble comprend trois vases à décor de serpents, un couteau à lame large, deux lampes à huile, u…
Monitoring the Stable at the Pasteur Institute
ArgumentDiphtheria serum production in France was dominated by the Pasteur Institute, which equipped a facility at Garches to produce the antitoxin on a large scale. This article treats the background to the founding of this facility, as well as its day-to-day functioning around 1900. The treatment integrates an examination of the practical undertaking of serum production by the Pasteur Institute with an analysis of the popular perception of the …
Speaking Truth and Power
It is, I suspect, no accident that it was a breakthrough in physics that caused Kitty Calavita (2002) to reflect on the need for law and society scholars to engage in acts of public discourse and aspire to become public intellectuals. Substantively, physics may be an unlikely source of theoretical help to law and society scholarship, but no discipline better epitomizes the role of science as a practical aspect of power and governance since the mi…
Retrospectives
Although maybe not the most fashionable area of study today, French science has a secure place in the classical canon of the history of science. Like the Scientific Revolution and Italian science at the beginning of the seventeenth century, French science, particularly eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century French science, remains a safe, albeit conservative, bet in terms of history-of-science teaching and research. The classic trope of …
The Hard Problem of the Many
The Ideological Effects of Actuarial Practices
Over the last century there has been significant growth within our society of practices that distribute costs and benefits to individuals based on statistical knowledge about the population. These actuarial practices like insurance premium setting and standardized testing in educational admissions are successful largely because they allow power to be exercised more effectively and at lower political cost. At the same time they generate ideologica…
In Another Kind of Wood
Columbus in the Twilight Zone
If Bruce Ackerman is right, the most contentious issues of modern constitutional theory have been fought out on a map that misses the most significant features of our political landscape. For the last decade constitutional theorists have hotly debated whether the U.S. Constitution is best understood through one or the other of an amazing variety of philosophical traditions including Lockean liberalism, Kantean ethics, hermeneutic theory, and the …
In Another Kind of Wood”
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Columbus in the Twilight Zone
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Castles of our Conscience
"The Long Walk Home" to Politics
W th the Supreme Court now in the hands of seven solidly conservative justices, liberals face a long walk home to the political activism which they participated in during the 1950s and 1960s. Along the way they may find Gerald Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope a sobering review of the last generation during which litigation rather than activism became the major channel for pursuing liberal goals. In lengthy case studies of school desegregation and abor…
Poor Discipline
In the Place of the Parent
Burdens of Proof in Modern Discourse
Between Power and Knowledge
The forthcoming publication in English of Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy by Jürgen Habermas comes at a time when the nature and role of legal studies in the United States is being problematized. In both law schools and in the broader scientific and humanistic discussion of law (the totality of which, for the sake of brevity, I call legal studies), the consensus of more than a generation is breaki…
Poor Discipline
Journal Article Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890–1990. By Jonathan Simon. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. x, 286 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-226-75856-7. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-226-75857-5.) Get access Paul W. Keve Paul W. Keve Richmond, Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81, Issue 4, March 1995, Page 1756, https://do…
Ballad of a Thin Man
Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is Do you, Mr. Jones?-Bob DylanWhat happens when the occupiers abandon the city but the forces of liberation fail to show up? What should we do when the rebels lose the people in a thicket of doctrine and become terrorists, but the empire can't imagine how to strike back except with more terror directed at the same people
Discipline and Punish
Dangerous Classes
In a society where a comic equates with knockabout amusment for children, the sudden pre-eminence of adult comics, on everything from political satire to erotic fantasy, has predictably attracted an enormous amount of attention. Adult comics are part of the cultural landscape in a way that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. In this first survey of its kind, Roger Sabin traces the history of comics for older readers from the end of the nin…
Managing the monstrous
Inventing Ourselves
Managing the monstrous
Sex offenders were once taken to be exemplary of the underlying psychopathological basis of crime. Today their significance is very different. Rather than occasions for testing our modernist faith in scientific rationality, they have become a lesson in the intransigence of evil. Recent laws aimed at addressing sex offenders reflect a transformation in the penal process that has been called the “new penology.” This new penology sees crime as a pro…
Refugees in a Carceral Age
Research Article| September 01 1998 Refugees in a Carceral Age: The Rebirth of Immigration Prisons in the United States Jonathan Simon Jonathan Simon Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1998) 10 (3): 577–607. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10-3-577 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan Simon; Refugees in a Carceral Age: The Rebirth of Imm…
Law after Society
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Naming and toxicity
Law after Society
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Understanding Prison Policy and Population Trends
American incarceration numbers increased fivefold between 1973 and 1997. Changes in penal policies and practices, not changes in crime rates, are the primary explanation, but there is disagreement about the causes of penal policy changes. Two prevalent explanations are that rising crime rates led to public demand for harsher policies and that politicians used crime policy to exacerbate public fears and win electoral favor. Both have merit but eit…
From the Big House to the Warehouse
The `Society of Captives' in the Era of Hyper-Incarceration
Forty years after the publication of Gresham Sykes's Society of Captives and the second edition of Donald Clemmer's The Prison Community (1958) the incarcerated population in the US, now over 2 million, has grown to an unprecedented size, but paradoxically attention to and concern with the social order of prisons in US academic and political discourse has declined. Just when the experience of imprisonment is becoming a normal pathway for signific…
Political science (59 works) · Sociology (55 works) · Law (46 works) · Criminology (34 works) · Philosophy (32 works) · Law (29 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (23 works) · Epistemology (21 works) · Politics (19 works)