Jonathan Simon is the Associate Dean of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Boalt Hall School of Law at University of California, Berkeley, author of Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear and Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890-1990, co-editor of Punishment & Society, associate editor of Law & Society Review, and a professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, and Legal Studies. Professor Simon has also been an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and a professor at the University of Miami. He is also the co-author of the theory of the “new penology,” sometimes referred to as “actuarial justice” (co-authored with Malcolm Feeley, also a professor of Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Boalt Hall). His research interests include criminology; penology; sociology; law and society; risk and the law; insurance models of governing risk; governance; the origins and consequences of, and solutions to, the California prison “crisis”; parole; prisons; capital punishment; immigration detention; and the warehousing of inmates.
He maintains several blogs including Governing Through Crime and the Berkeley Jurisprude.