Research Expertise and Interest

punishment & society, criminal law, risk and the law, law & society

Research Description

Jonathan Simon’s research examines the intersection of punishment and society, with a focus on mass incarceration, capital punishment, policing, and penal politics. His book Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Case and the Future of Imprisonment (New Press, 2014) examines the humanitarian medical crisis caused by California’s mass incarceration policies and the legal battles over prison healthcare, culminating in the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Plata (2011). His current work explores the foundations of the United States' modern punitive civic religion, tracing its historical and ideological roots. Recent publications include “American Policing and the Struggle for Black Civic Rights” in The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America (2023) and“Dignity Defied: Legal-Rational Myths and the Surplus Legitimacy of the Carceral State” in Law and Social Inquiry (2025). He also co-authored “Governing Through Crime in the Twenty-First Century” with Sarah DiMagno in The Routledge History of Crime in America (forthcoming). His forthcoming work, “From Eugenics to Big Data: Towards a Genealogy of Criminal Risk Assessment in the United States,” will appear in Algorithmic Transformations of Power: Between Trust, Conflict, and Uncertainty, edited by Christoph Burchard and Indra Spiecker genannt Döhmann (Nomos, 2025)