Obama as Scrooge: no Christmas clemency grants

December 24, 2009

As I complained in posts here and here and here around Thanksgiving, it was sad and telling that President Barack Obama’s first use of his historic clemency power was to continue the modern (silly?) tradition of pardoning a turkey. At that time, however, I was hoping that Prez Obama might be saving up some holiday clemencies for the Christmas season. But now the Obamas have gone off to Hawaii on their vacation; as this official webpage reveals, Prez Obama has left behind on Christmas Eve nearly 3,500 requests for pardons and commutations sitting unresolved on his Oval Office desk.

In this new Huffington Post commentary, which is titled “What I Want For Christmas: Mass Clemency,” Jacob Appel makes a fulsome pitch for all executive branch leaders to consider the granting of mass clemency this holiday season. Here are some highlights:

[W]ith the United States now boasting the highest incarceration rate in the world — more than 1 in every 100 Americans in currently behind bars — our nation is long overdue for a mass clemency of non-violent felons and those unlikely to re-offend. Such a collective pardon and commutation would reunite hundreds of thousands of families, save billions of dollars in incarceration costs, and might foster a national spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation….

So here’s my Christmas wish: Each chief executive should order a special panel to determine, as quickly as possible, which prisoners either have a history of extreme violence or pose a high risk of re-offending. Those meeting neither criteria should be transitioned home as quickly as possible….

One of the glaring — yet too often overlooked — failings of contemporary America is that we have become a nation obsessed with justice and retribution. We claim to be The Land of the Free, yet we have lost sight of what it means to be imprisoned: denied liberty and access to one’s family, subjected to isolation and violence and unspeakable boredom. We have come to believe, in the most pernicious way, that people should get what they deserve. What a sea change it might be in our public discourse and our civic life if we focused instead upon mercy and forgiveness. A merciful and forgiving culture might find itself with less anger, less social disruption, and even less crime. If we liberated only half of our prisoners, we could spend the billions of dollars saved educating children, or providing substance-abuse treatment to addicts, or training mental health workers — breaking the cycle of neglect that sets future prisoners on their initial trajectory toward misconduct….

Fortunately, the majority of our more than two million prisoners are not fanatics and sociopaths. Many are good people who have exercised poor judgment. They have the same hopes and dreams as ordinary, free Americans, but they now squander their lives behind bars because our prison-industrial complex has gone haywire. They are, in short, the meek and wretched who the Biblical Jesus — whether literal or figurative — would want us to remember in our holiday prayers.

Will the White House read this column and decide upon a mass clemency? Unlikely. Such a bold step might make President Obama truly worthy of his Nobel Prize, and win him the praise of history, but political leaders of all stripes think in terms of poll numbers. I suspect that a mass clemency could be sold to the American public — particularly as more and more Americans find their own loved ones imprisoned — but I understand that to attempt such a courageous step requires a leap of considerable faith. I am more optimistic that, if enough people clamor for a mass clemency, one inspired state governor — possibly a lame-duck chief executive without a political future — will consider such a dramatic and compassionate act. If that happens, and the social order does not crumble, other political leaders may have the courage to follow. In the interim, I can only hope that the government lawyers assembling last-minute pardons lists, possibly as I write this, remember that each name they add to their clemency register is another flesh-and-blood human being who will be able to spent the Christmas holiday with his or her family.

While I am impressed by Appel’s pitch for mass clemencies, I would have been grateful if President Obama would have granted even a single clemency before heading off to the islands. In this Thanksgiving post, I called out President Obama and the criminal justice members of his White House team as turkeys. Now, this Christmas Eve, the label Scrooge seems fitting for all these folks.

Relatedly, as I have suggested before, I think that the media, public policy groups and the left side of the blogosphere also merit some spiritual grief this Christmas eve. Save for an few commentaries like Appel’s, there has been precious little media or blogosphere criticism of the failure of President Obama to bring any hope or change to modern federal clemency stinginess. Sadly, far too many criminal justice groups and bloggers, who should be making a big stink about Obama’s failure to show a true concern for the meek and wretched sitting in prison this holiday season, seem to be content tucked in their beds without stirring this night before Christmas.

Some related posts on federal clemency realities: