Jonathan Simon quoted by ABC 7 News, Dec. 7, 2017
Professor Jonathan Simon said, “It wasn’t Berkeley, it was Alabama and Selma that got students from here going in the sixties and right now, it’s what’s happening to immigrants, what’s happening to young people color in our cities.”
Malcolm M. Feeley and Jonathan Simon article cited in The Crime Report, Nov. 14, 2017
As Malcolm M. Feeley and Jonathan Simon predicted in a 2012 article for Berkeley Law, past decades have seen a paradigm shift in academic and policy circles, and “the language of probability and risk increasingly replaces earlier discourse of diagnosis and retributive punishment.”
Jonathan Simon quoted by San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 2, 2017
“It’s predictable that, as you have fewer and fewer people going to state prison for low-level crimes, you’ll have fewer prisoners able to volunteer for the firefighting program.”
Franklin Zimring and Jonathan Simon quoted by California Magazine, March 8, 2017
“It’s a matter of personnel more than principle,” Zimring says. “Trump wants to nominate Supreme Court justices who will push for expansion of Second Amendment interests, not limits. It can be assumed that [recent Trump Supreme Court nominee Neil] Gorsuch would move in that direction.”
“Most gun laws are written at the local level,” says Simon, “and it would take the Supreme Court a very long time to say the states can’t regulate at all. And while it’s possible a more conservative court would move more aggressively on Second Amendment cases, we’re a long way from that point.”
Jonathan Simon quoted by Daily Journal (registration required), Nov. 7, 2016
“If we actually step up and start investing more in rehabilitation, we can use this good time credit accelerator system to really push people out at the time that they pose little risk to the community, and there’s very little value in incarcerating them,” Simon said.
Jonathan Simon quoted by Vox, August 22, 2016
“At the end of the day, the ability of courts to control the level of incarceration is relatively weak compared to legislatures who can change the underlying sentencing structure,” Simon warns. But one thing the Court can do is raise the cost of incarceration by insisting upon prisoners’ rights to humane conditions.
Jonathan Simon interviewed by San Francisco Chronicle, July 23, 2016
“The media has been giving all of these events, especially Dallas and Baton Rouge, assassination-level coverage, like with President Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr.,” Simon said. “And that exacerbates things — the rhetoric, the emotions. If we give that much space to shootings, let’s give the same space to discussion of policing, to real grievances, to why these shootings are happening.”
Jonathan Simon quoted in Daily Journal (registration required), July 14, 2016
“We’re talking about parole consideration, not a guaranteed exit,” Simon said. “The amendment is not very specific about how the parole process will be carried out, but the nature of parole is a focus on the individual and their risk to public safety, and parole has the discretion to deny.”
Jonathan Simon interviewed by Salon, Feb. 21, 2016
“Scalia was perhaps the strongest opponent of proportionality analysis of any kind under the Amendment,” emails Jonathan Simon. … “A more robust proportionality rule would go a long way to eliminating some outsized determinate sentences that drive a big part of mass incarceration.”
Jonathan Simon quoted in Daily Journal (registration required), Oct. 19, 2015
UC Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon would like to see drug courts’ best features integrated into the justice system as a whole, rather than confined to a specialized sub-system. “If we’re now in an era when there’s possibilities for rescaling our ambitions for what the criminal process ought to handle, then I think that drug courts might be part of the problem,” Simon said.