San Jose Mercury News, June 14, 2010 by Howard Mintz
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_15293678?nclick_check=1
“The case will turn on the highly technical question of just when a court can order inmates to be released,” said Jonathan Simon, a UC Berkeley law professor who has followed the 20-year legal battle closely. “(The law) makes it extra burdensome for courts to order inmate releases.”
The Oakland Tribune, April 30, 2010 by Paul T. Rosynsky
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_14984803
If manslaughter remains an option, the jury could find Mehserle guilty of the crime but with a lesser penalty. Without manslaughter as an option, the jury will be forced to make a stark choice resulting in a longer prison term or no prison term at all, said Jonathan Simon, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. “This will force a choice,” Simon said. “It’s high-gain, high-risk.”
The Texas Tribune, January 7, 2010 by Brandi Grissom
http://www.texastribune.org/stories/2010/jan/07/small-towns-big-border-business/
In the words of Berkeley Law professor Jonathan Simon, we are “governing through crime”—isolation and exclusion in an expansive penal system is the dominant response to tough social problems.
Prawfs Blawg, November 20, 2009 by Jonathan Simon
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2009/11/hope-v-fear.html
Could there be any better index of the relative strength of hope and fear in a polity than spending on universities and prisons? For the American “states,” who have no armies, universities and prisons are the most concentrated and material manifestations of state sovereignty itself.
ABC News, November 2, 2009 by Emily Friedman
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/anthony-sowell-philip-garrido-cases-raise-questions-sex/story?id=8976114
“The system is broken in the sense that we have a lot of people on sex registries and while it gives us a list of people who might be involved in crimes, there are so many people on those lists that they’re overly inclusive,” said Simon.
Contra Costa Times, October 14, 2009 by Paul T. Rosynsky
http://www.contracostatimes.com/search/ci_12452840?IADID=Search-www.contracostatimes.com-&nclick_check=1
“They have a very steep discount rate for the future,” said Jonathan Simon, a professor of law at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. “They put no value on their own tomorrow, and that is the worst possible situation for deterring, because they are not thinking about tomorrow.”
Democracy Now, September 9, 2009 Host Amy Goodman
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/9/overcrowded_and_going_broke_a_look
I think we need a whole new paradigm change about public safety in the state. We treat public safety as if it equaled prisons. It’s sort of like treating hamburgers as if they were the only food that one could consume. We need police. We need probation officers. We need first responders. We need drug treatment and mental health caseworkers.
CBS Early Show, September 2, 2009 by Hattie Kauffman
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/09/02/earlyshow/main5281676.shtml
“They may not have violated their own rules but I think it’s pretty clear that they violated what could be considered good parole practice.”
The Daily Record, August 4, 2009 by Caryn Tamber
http://www.mddailyrecord.com/article.cfm?id=12110&type=UTTM
“This very pro-state defendant decision opens up not only the immediate legal opportunities to take out these decrees but probably, more commonly, an opportunity to negotiate them on more favorable terms,” he said.
KGO-TV, July 23, 2009 by Cecilia Vega
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/state&id=6930588
UC Berkeley law professor and criminologist Jonathan Simon says the fears are unfounded, just the phrase “early release” has become a political lightening rod. “Release is getting to be one of those words, sort of like taxes, where you have to invent new words to describe what you’re doing because they’ve become so politicized,” said Simon.
The New York Times, June 10, 2009 by Jim Lewis
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14prisons-t.html?_r=1
As Jonathan Simon, a law professor at Berkeley, pointed out to me, convicts tend to come from cities; guards do not. Culture clashes inevitably arise. Skilled labor — doctors, psychologists and the like — is harder to find in rural areas, and so are the volunteers who work in the many rehabilitation programs. The families of working-class and poor convicts often can’t afford to travel a few hundred miles to visit their relatives. As a result, prisoners have a harder time maintaining ties with the lives they left behind.
Oakland Tribune, May 26, 2009 by Paul T. Rosynsky
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/oakland-homicides-2008/ci_12452840
“The good news is we have always known that murderers have a low rate of recidivism,” Simon said. “There is something that gets their attention after they are convicted to a life sentence.” These prisoners often mentor others while sharing a jail cell, Simon said…. “People have this extraordinary ability to be optimistic, while they are aware of the large amount of people that are denied parole, they believe that if they can get that college degree, or complete that one program, they are going to get lucky,” he said.
The Sacramento Bee, May 12, 2009 by Stan Oklobdzija
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/2322125/
“As a neighborhood gentrifies, affluent people are more demanding consumers. They demand security,” said Dr. Jonathan Simon, an associate dean at UC Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law…. While gentrification might do great things for crime rates and land values, lower-income residents can be pushed into poorer parts of town, said Simon.
UC Berkeley NewsCenter, May 7, 2009 by Cathy Cockrell
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/05/07_crime2.shtml
“When we say that we want government to be tough on crime, we mean that we want prison sentences to be long and the rhetoric to be sharp. But we don’t actually hold government accountable for reducing crime. If we did, we wouldn’t put up with prisons that produce 70 percent recidivism rates. We would long ago have said ‘Why are we building and supporting these prisons if they’re failing most of the time?’ Instead we’ve been satisfied with the rhetoric of toughness, and an emotional appeal to solidarity with the victim and disparaging disdain for the offender. We’ve taken government off the hook.”
KQED, Forum with Michael Krasny, March 26, 2009 Host Scott Shafer
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R903260900
“We sent too many people to prison to begin with. We don’t do much with them while they’re there. Half of all prisoners coming out of the system haven’t done any programming because there’s no incentive. Often we just can’t provide it for them given the current state of our prisons, which were designed very badly; they’re chronically overcrowded. They have about twice as many people in them as they should, so when they’re coming out on parole there’s been very little effort to get them ready for that.”
NPR, Weekend Edition Sunday, March 16, by Nancy Mullane
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88324577
“It would have been quite routine for people pretty close to the time of their eligibility to get a parole date and get paroled…. This [1988] ballot initiative made each one of these decisions a personal accountability point for the governor.”