There may be areas of human life in which people have profited from understanding history, but criminal justice is definitely not one of them. In this field, each generation seems to undo the last generation's reforms. Each generation resurrects old failures and trots them out as new. A previous generation hailed indeterminate sentencing as a great

Lawrence M. Friedman is Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford University. Harry N. Scheiber is the Stefan Riesenfeld Professor of Law and History, Boalt Hall School of Law, in the University of California at Berkeley.