What Pennsylvania Knows That the White House Doesn't: Lessons From Governors Who Actually Grant Pardons

A System That Actually Functions

In a modest hearing room in Harrisburg, the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons convenes on a schedule that would astonish anyone familiar with the federal clemency apparatus. Cases are heard in batches. Votes are recorded. Recommendations flow to the governor, who signs them. For thousands of Pennsylvanians, forgiveness is not an abstraction — it is a document, delivered within a comprehensible timeframe.

Contrast that with Washington, where the Office of the Pardon Attorney sits atop a backlog that has at times exceeded 17,000 petitions, with many applicants waiting a decade or longer for a decision that never comes. The federal system has not merely slowed; it has calcified. And that calcification has consequences measured in lost jobs, denied housing, and families living in perpetual legal limbo.

The State Laboratories of Mercy

Pennsylvania's system works because it is structured to work. A five-member board — including the lieutenant governor and an appointed crime victim advocate — reviews applications against published criteria, holds public hearings, and issues recommendations the governor can either accept or reject with explanation. Transparency is not a courtesy; it is the design.

Illinois, under successive governors, demonstrated that volume and deliberateness are not mutually exclusive. The Illinois Prisoner Review Board processed clemency recommendations by the thousands, and both Republican and Democratic governors signed large shares of them. California's governor, meanwhile, has used executive clemency as both an individual remedy and a statement of values, granting pardons in ways that restore firearm rights, lift immigration exposure, and seal the record of state convictions.

The differences among these states matter less than the common thread: each built an institutional pipeline. Applications are reviewed by dedicated staff. Criteria are articulated. Decisions are rendered. None of this requires a constitutional amendment. It requires administrative will.

What the Federal System Could Borrow Tomorrow

Three reforms transfer directly from the state level to the federal one.

First, publishable criteria. Pennsylvania tells applicants what the board is looking for. The federal process operates on folk wisdom and rumor. Publishing standards would not guarantee outcomes, but it would end the lottery-like uncertainty that deters worthy applicants and enriches the clemency-consulting industry.

Second, a real docket. State boards hear cases on a calendar. The federal Office of the Pardon Attorney could adopt a rolling review schedule with statutory reporting requirements — how many petitions received, how many reviewed, how many recommended, how many denied. Sunlight is not a radical demand.

Third, follow-through infrastructure. A pardon in Pennsylvania comes with a pathway: courts are notified, records are updated, and the pardon holder receives guidance on what the document unlocks. In the federal system, a certificate often arrives with no instructions at all.

The Economic Argument for Copying the States

This is not merely a question of compassion, though compassion should suffice. A conviction record that never clears suppresses labor force participation, reduces tax revenue, and increases reliance on public assistance. When states process pardons at scale, they are effectively releasing hundreds of millions of dollars in suppressed earning power back into their economies.

The federal government employs more people, touches more interstate commerce, and presides over a larger incarcerated population than any single state. The economic upside of a functioning federal clemency system dwarfs anything Harrisburg or Springfield could achieve alone.

The Will, Not the Way

The Constitution grants the president the broadest pardon power in the democratic world — broader, arguably, than any governor's. What presidents lack is not authority but machinery and motivation. The states prove the machinery is buildable. The only remaining question is whether any occupant of the White House will decide that mercy, administered at scale and on schedule, is worth the administrative effort.

The governors have shown it can be done. The pen is, and always has been, available.