Research Expertise and Interest

punishment, social policy, risk, mass incarceration, reentry

Research Description

Most of Jonathan Simon's work concerns punishment and society. He has focused on four areas in particular, mass incarceration, capital punishment, police and urban youth, and penal politics. His published recent research is on the humanitarian medical crisis created by California's mass incarceration practices and the jurisprudence produced by twenty five years of litigation over health (medical and mental) in California prisons culminating in the Supreme Court' Brown v. Plata (May 2011).  His latest project traces the sources of four pillars of our modern punitive civic religion in the United States.