You may have seen the news that Mark Wahlberg is petitioning the Governor of Massachusetts for a pardon for crimes he committed as a teen in Boston in the 1980s. These were a bit more than your typical bad seed childhood run-ins with the law. At least two incidents could possibly qualify today as hate crimes. Though I’ve increasingly admired Wahlberg’s acting work and his ability to transition from a music act/novelty actor to the real thing, I can’t say I’ve given him a great deal of thoughts one way or another.
But there’s more to this story than celebrity news.
In reading the online chatter today I saw a couple write-ups by prestige pundits arguing that Wahlberg had to accept the consequences of his actions like everyone else, along with predictable moralizing about the rich and powerful and responsibility and various other stuff. But here’s the thing. Whether or not Wahlberg should get a pardon, lots and lots of other people should. And probably, just speaking for myself, he should too.
This is not some obscure point about people wanting symbolic absolution decades after doing time. Pardon and commutation are not only important in themselves, our stinginess with them is umbilically tied to our ridiculously inflated prison population and, yes, even to the militarization of policing, tactics that lead to someone like Eric Garner ending up dead and the fact that many felons are saddled with the repercussions of run-ins with the law for the rest of their lives.
With presidential pardons, can you remember the last time a president pardoned someone who was actually in jail for a serious crime but for whatever reason the president or his advisors decided the sentence was simply too long or that he deserved clemency? Are there really no prisoners in the federal system serving excessively long drug related prison sentences who deserve clemency because of their meritorious behavior or simply because the sentence was just wildly longer than it ever should have been?
What counts today as a presidential pardon is usually someone convicted and punished 40 years ago for selling moonshine or some other marginal crime for which they were convicted, sentenced and served a relatively light sentence decades ago.
Not only have presidential pardons slowed to a trickle, the Justice Department guidelines for evaluating pardon applications actually specify that an applicant should already have served out the entirety of their punishment which makes the whole concept pardon and clemency notional and frankly all but irrelevant.
Should garden variety felons really lose their right to vote for decades or for life? Some of these policies have long histories tied to racial disparities in sentencing and law enforcement. But combining with that is the broad social and political response to the crime boom of the late 20th century.
Right or wrong, we shouldn’t be surprised that the rise of and seemingly uncontrollable rate of violent crime between roughly 1960 and 1995 led to harsher and more merciless policing tactics and higher levels of imprisonment. But crime rates have been falling for two decades and now stand at some of the lowest rates in modern history. And yet the patterns of 80s era policing, 90s era sentencing standards and the more general stance that people should live with the brand and taint of their earlier wrongdoing forever has continued.
There is a challenge and danger created by the inherently arbitrary nature of executive pardon. But it’s a necessary counterweight to the equally inherent blindness of justice. As a society today we are in particular need of more pardoning and clemency, likely even on a mass basis, because the practice of hyper-punishment, if it ever was justified by the crime boom era which gave it rise, is simply no longer merited today by the historically low rates of crime.
Yes, Wahlberg probably has a much better shot at a pardon than lots of others who probably deserve it more. But the answer isn’t faux-populist snarking at his privilege or arrogance. The answer is giving it to him and lots and lots of other people to.
