Jonathan Simon quoted in East Bay Express, March 28, 2012

Law School professor Jonathan Simon said there is a “very real concern that the stay-away orders are pretextual” and meant specifically to chill First Amendment activity…. Overall, he sees the Alameda County DA’s use of stay-aways against Occupy Cal protesters as reflective of concerns that Occupy Cal “would become an extension of a strong Occupy Oakland movement,” and is meant to serve as a “cold, calculating deterrent to students that this is what can happen if you step out of line.”

Jonathan Simon quoted in The Daily Californian, March 22, 2012

UC Berkeley School of Law professor Jonathan Simon said in an email that court-issued stay-away orders in general are “a very serious infringement of fundamental rights” and “should never be used unless a very credible threat exists,” but that they are “not uncommon” when there are concerns about ongoing violations.

The Daily Californian, February 6, 2012 by Chloe Hunt
http://bit.ly/w6HZ7B

UC Berkeley School of Law Professor Jonathan Simon, asked by the board to be a faculty representative to the Nov. 9 events, said he thought members of the community facing charges should not speak at the forums.

KALW News, The Informant, July 18, 2011 by Sara Mayeux
http://informant.kalwnews.org/2011/07/the-high-cost-of-capital-punishment-in-california/

Given these delays, Berkeley professor Jonathan Simon has argued that, in essence, a California death sentence is actually two sentences in one: both a life-in-prison sentence and a death sentence.

The Bay Citizen, June 13, 2011 by Nicole Jones
http://www.baycitizen.org/mehserle-verdict/story/legal-story-behind-why-johannes-mehserle/

“His case exemplifies how arbitrary criminal law can be,” Simon said referring to how a small difference in the verdict can make a big difference in time served. “I am sympathetic to the feeling that many others have that Mehserle’s short sentence was incommensurate with his culpability,” Simon said. “Part of the function of the criminal law is to signal community outrage at a course of conduct, and that seems to have failed here.”

KALW News, The Informant, April 26, 2011 by Rina Palta
http://informant.kalwnews.org/2011/04/debating-what-to-do-about-oaklands-homicide-wave/

Where Johnson falls victim to his own “common sense” is in believing there is a way to deter those bullets today (or the hands firing them). But everything we know from empirical research and the experience of our own failed war on crime is that young men do not put enough stock in the future to be deterred by crackdowns and long prison terms (they already accept those consequences).

The Global Herald, February 24, 2011 by Jonathan Simon
http://theglobalherald.com/crime-the-emergence-of-an-exceptional-penal-rationale/11926/

What explains the commitment of many American states (and California is perhaps the leading example of a much more widely spread pattern) to this kind of degrading punishment, and why has it remained largely unchanged despite nearly two decades of declining crime rates, grave fiscal difficulties, and growing scandals involving overcrowding and incompetent medical care?

The Sacramento Bee, November 29, 2010 by Jon Ortiz
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/11/29/3217884/don-novey-loses-election-gamble.html

“Novey was early in recognizing the potential of crime fear as a new anchor of politics,” said UC Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon.

San Jose Mercury News, November 28, 2010 by Howard Mintz
http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_16724376?nclick_check=1

Legal experts predict the state may have a strong argument in the Supreme Court, which is decidedly more conservative on law-and-order issues than the three judges who issued the California order…. But Jonathan Simon … said the justices may still be reluctant to tamper with the overall factual findings of the three-judge panel, although they may decide the courts need to give the state “more leeway” to comply with the orders.

The Boston Globe, November 8, 2010 by James Carroll
http://bit.ly/bIFtIp

Just as irrational assumptions of “risk assessment” prompted mortgage brokers to understate the risks of home ownership, they led prosecutors, in a parallel noted by Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon, to grossly overstate the risks to society of huge numbers of defendants. The housing bubble, Simon shows, devastated neighborhoods by littering them with abandoned properties. The prison bubble devastated neighborhoods by depriving them of fathers and husbands.

The Sacramento Bee, October 22, 2010 by Peter Hecht
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/10/22/3123343/feds-could-dash-cities-hopes-of.html#ixzz136vCCJAw

UC Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon said the measures underscore the potentially diverse “patchwork” of regulation if Proposition 19 passes. “You might have some towns that set a very low tax and very few regulations, seeking to create marijuana commercial zones,” Simon said. But other cities are likely to seek higher taxes, he said, because of “their desire for revenue and opposition to becoming known as a local pot hub.”

Slate, October 8, 2010 by Sasha Abramsky
http://www.slate.com/id/2270328/?from=rss

University of California at Berkeley professor of law Jonathan Simon writes that these men and women in many ways become the human equivalent of underwater homes bought with subprime mortgages—they are “toxic persons” in the way those homes have been defined as “toxic assets,” condemned to failure.

Stateline.org, September 7, 2010 by Louis Jacobson
http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=510578

“In many states, especially California, the death penalty figures less as a real tool of criminal justice or crime control and more of a symbolic statement about whether someone identifies the fears of ordinary citizens about crime,” says Jonathan Simon, a law professor at the University of California (Berkeley).

Governing through Crime, August 15, 2010 by Jonathan Simon
http://governingthroughcrime.blogspot.com/2010/08/public-criminology-cool-read-on-hot.html

Loader and Sparks respond to the scientific ambitions of many criminologists in a way that is respectful, illuminating, and in the end, devastating to the pretensions of this ambition. Drawing on the growing field of “science studies,” they make the point that the natural sciences are hardly a model for how science can lead rather than be dominated by politics. Indeed, the very field from which they draw their “hot climate” metaphor is a perfect example of how deeply politicized the natural sciences are.

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.”