COMMENTARY WELSEY TINGEY VIA UNSPLASH
ON PRISONS
To act justly, to love mercy It’s time to truly act on criminal justice reform. By ANTHONY EHLERS
O
regon Governor Kate Brown has granted more commutations and pardons than all of that state’s governors in the last 50 years combined. Brown’s effort raises a question here in Illinois: why isn’t Governor J.B. Pritzker using his clemency powers more effectively and expansively? He has stated repeatedly that he’s in favor of criminal justice reform. If that’s truly the case, it’s time for Pritzker to address the historical harms and injustices associated with mass incarceration. It’s time that the state of Illinois reflects the governor’s stated values and beliefs. Clemency is an umbrella term that refers to the ability of governors to grant mercy to incarcerated people. Clemency includes par-
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dons, which fully forgive someone who has committed a crime; commutations, which reduce prison sentences, often resulting in early release; reprieves, which pause punishment; and eliminating court-related fines and fees. Historically, presidents and governors regularly used clemency for things like wrongful convictions, witness recantation, flawed evidence, police misconduct, and a prisoner’s exceptional rehabilitation. Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers that clemency is a necessary check on a justice system that levels excessive punishment. Without clemency, he argued, “justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.” There are many reasons Pritzker should be granting clemency. The injustices of mass incarceration, the tough-on-crime deterrence
myth, racism, laws like Truth in Sentencing, and life without the possibility of parole (also called death by incarceration, or DBI), are inextricably intertwined. The victims of mass incarceration are suffering from overly punitive laws and dying in prison despite yearslong self-rehabilitation. Mass incarceration is the civil rights issue of our era, and we cannot eradicate mass incarceration without addressing long sentences. Clemency is a tool for criminal justice reform, and an act of grace, exercising the belief that compassionate mercy and ensuring public safety are not mutually exclusive. “The state of Illinois, like too many states in our union, is experiencing an unacknowledged and little known humanitarian crisis where thousands of people are over-sentenced to
death by incarceration,” Joseph Dole, policy director of Parole Illinois, wrote in 2021. “These DBI sentences destroy thousands of lives for no legitimate penological purpose, are a historical anomaly in Illinois and around the world, and are completely unnecessary for public safety.” While Illinois had the death penalty until 2011, it was only handed out about a dozen times a year statewide. Even at the height of the death penalty in Illinois, when many innocent people sat awaiting execution, Death Row never held more than 200 people. Today, Illinois sentences hundreds of people to death by incarceration every year! This transition from viewing a dozen people per year as irredeemable to hundreds was not only unjustified, but has resulted in the steady growth of Illinois’s “slow Death Row.” It’s important to note that juveniles and young adults are more amenable to rehabilitation and less culpable for crimes than fully mature adults. In 2019, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that sentences of more than 40 years were a de facto life sentence for people younger than 18. Maintaining sentences that ignore those facts and sentencing juveniles and young adults to die in prison is inhumane. We arrived at this humanitarian crisis via emotional hyperbole, racism, political gamesmanship, the abandonment of rehabilitation as an ideal, and the mass demonization and dehumanization of “criminals.” I’ve often described the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) as a waste-management system. Society views us as garbage, and so opportunities for rehabilitation are nonexistent. In 1994, Congress banned prisoners from Pell grant eligibility amid a change in the social milieu from favoring rehabilitation to demanding punitiveness. IDOC largely abandoned college and vocational programs in the 1990s, and turned to warehousing people in increasingly inhumane conditions. Despite that, many prisoners took it upon themselves to self-rehabilitate. Many do so even though they have no avenue of release other than executive clemency, which has been a nearly nonexistent remedy for decades. Today, society and the IDOC have acknowl-