Jonathan Simon

simonMy current work is focused around three major areas of interest.  The first area concerns the role of crime and criminal justice in shaping the larger framework of law and governance in the United States.  My book, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2006), describes this influence in broad strokes across American state and society. In further and more empirically oriented work I plan to examine more closely how engagement in the well capitalized social systems of criminal justice and crime risk prevention affects the lives and choices of ordinary Americans including the working poor and immigrants.

The second area concerns the way risk is operationalized in late modern law and society.  I have published a number of recent papers about the renewed use of risk prediction in criminal justice and plan to follow this up with further empirical work in policing and corrections.  I also plan to return to a longer term interest in the history of civil justice and its relationship to insurance and other systems of risk management.

The third interest concerns the intellectual history of law and the social sciences in their interaction.  I am currently working on an article on the differences in the logic of inquiry used in the law and society and law and economics movements respectively.

Professor Simon’s faculty profile, bio, and other information can be found here.