Earlier versions of parts of this book were presented as the 2018 Kadish Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley; as the 2019 Criminal Justice Lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London; at law faculty workshops at Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Davis, the University of San Diego, the University of Southern California, the University of Utah, and Vanderbilt University; at the Law of the Police Conference at the University of South Carolina in 2019; and at two sessions of the annual Criminal Justice Roundtable, one held at Harvard in 2018 and the other at Yale in 2019. I am grateful for the criticism and suggestions I received on these occasions, especially from Kathy Abrams, Scott Altman, Ashutosh Bhagwat, Paul Cassell, Sharon Dolovich, Trevor Garner, Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos, Rachel Harmon, Youngjae Lee, Katerina Linos, Sara Mayeux, Saira Mohamed, Daphna Renan, Dan Richman, Alice Ristroph, Andrea Roth, Jonathan Simon, Avani Sood, Seth Stoughton, and Aaron Tang. In between, many friends and colleagues read parts of the book and helped me strengthen it; I am particularly indebted to Michelle Anderson, Rick Banks, Ira Ellman, Todd Foglesong, James Forman, Barry Friedman, Emma Kaufman, Nicola Lacey, Máximo Langer, Bernadette Meyler, Deborah Rhode, Michael Wald, and Frank Zimring. As usual, my brother Jeff Sklansky paired perceptive criticism with warm encouragement. Once I finished the manuscript, James Forman, Jonathan Simon, Carol Steiker, and Frank Zimring all graciously read the whole thing, and the book is much better because of the feedback they provided.
Sharmila Sen, the editorial director of Harvard University Press, served as the book’s principal editor and improved it in countless ways. I am deeply grateful for the faith Sharmila showed in the book and for her sage counsel and constructive criticism. Often she understood the book better than I did. The book’s production editor at HUP, Louise Robbins, and Wendy Nelson, its copy editor at Westchester Publishing Services, sharpened my arguments and saved me from many embarrassing errors. Heather Hughes at HUP and Angela Piliouras at WPS kept the entire editorial process running smoothly, a remarkable feat in the pandemic year of 2020. I am indebted as well to Stephanie Vyce at HUP for helpful guidance and to David Luljak for preparing the index.
Stanford Law School has been a welcoming and sustaining home. I am grateful to my colleagues and students, to two wise and supportive deans, Liz Magill and Jenny Martinez, and to my superb administrative associate, Ginny Smith. I owe many thanks to the entire staff of the Robert Crown Law Library, and in particular to Richard Porter and to four current and former research librarians, Leizel Ching, Marion Miller, Katherine Siler, and George Wilson. Two law students at Stanford, Emma Schindler and Jennifer Teitell, also provided excellent research assistance, and in writing Chapter 3 I benefited from research presented in an insightful seminar paper by Clare Riva. Alain Kelder, in the law school’s information technology department, helped me get the data for Figures 1 and 4.
I cannot express the extent of my debt to the executive director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, Debbie Mukamal, and to my fellow faculty co-directors at the center, Bob Weisberg and the late Joan Petersilia. Suffice it to say that their influence can be found on every page of this book. Joan’s death in 2019 was a hard blow for Stanford and for the world of criminal justice scholarship. For Bob and Debbie and me it also meant losing a treasured friend.
My deepest thanks go to my wife, Deborah Lambe, and to our wonderful son, Joseph Edward Lambe Sklansky, to whom this book is dedicated.