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Since the senseless murder of four police officers in broad daylight near Tacoma, Washington, last month, much blame has been cast in the media and other circles. The consensus is largely that former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was wrong to have commuted the 108-year sentence of alleged shooter Maurice Clemmons.

Huckabee based his decision to commute the sentence on Clemmons’s age (16 at the time of his crime in Arkansas) and the excessive length of the sentence. Shortly afterward, and after having served 11 years of his sentence, Clemmons was eligible for parole. Nine years later, he had moved to Washington, where he gunned down the police in a coffee shop.

So, who was culpable? Huckabee? Clemmons? The states of Arkansas and Washington? Or was clemency to blame?

The former governor recently told an audience at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service that he would have acted differently had he been able to know what Clemmons would do nine years later. He said he continues to believe in a system in which excesses in the courts can be addressed.

“What I fear is, because of the political backlash from this incident, governors in the future will never, ever want to consider clemency again,” he added.

He has good reason to fear, because by all indications, few executives—whether state governors or U.S. presidents—have been as inclined to grant clemency as Huckabee. As governor, he commuted 1,033 during 10½ years in office. Now, because of the unforeseeable and unfortunate turn of events in Washington on Thanksgiving weekend, it’s doubtful that other elected executives will be stepping up to the plate any time soon to exercise this unique power.

And that’s a shame. Because sometimes justice is miscarried. Civil liberties get trampled. People receive unfair sentences.

Unfair sentencing became rampant in the late 1980s after the U.S. Congress passed laws with stiff penalties in hopes of deterring people from illegal drug activity. Many of these penalties are mandatory, meaning that judges may not impose a penalty less than the number of years chosen by Congress. They also prevent judges from considering other relevant factors, such as the defendant’s role in the offense, age or likelihood of committing a future offense.

In the meantime, we have reaped the whirlwind of excessive sentencing: The country’s prison population has exploded, and today 2.3 million Americans are behind bars. That’s one out of every 100 people in our nation. Prisons are bursting at the seams and corrections costs are eating up state and federal budgets. Sexual assault, by both inmates and prison staff, is rife, and mental illnesses plague as many as half of those incarcerated.

Because money is tight, prisons are increasingly abandoning any semblance of rehabilitation by eliminating reentry preparation and educational programs. And those drug users that Congress decided should be locked up for five, 10, 20 years? Not only are they not receiving treatment to help them kick their habit, they’re spending their lengthy sentences learning and honing ways to be better criminals when they finally are released.

And they will be released. More than 600,000 prisoners return to our neighborhoods and communities every year. Without any preparation to live productive, law-abiding lives, at least two-thirds of them will commit new crimes and eventually return to prison.

If we’re to ever get this unsafe, unproductive and untenable situation under control, we’re going to have to accept the fact that locking up people for long terms isn’t the solution. There is no question that we must incarcerate those who are violent and refuse to change. But we also have to reach out a hand of mercy and help to the majority of prisoners who have grown up in poverty and ignorance, in fatherless homes, attending inept schools and barred from decent health care, opportunity and hope.

The United States needs to take a hard look at its sentencing guidelines and begin to reform them immediately. Probation and parole boards will also need to be overhauled and properly funded to handle released ex-offenders and ensure that they have a decent chance of staying out of trouble and prison.

Assessment tools are available that can measure an individual’s level of risk for re-committing crime. Good time credit opportunities can be increased and truth-in-sentencing laws reformed to reduce the time an offender is required to be in prison before he or she is eligible for parole. In addition, courts can be empowered to employ alternative sentences that focus on rehabilitation and restitution in place of incarceration.

Some states have already set up professional pardon and parole boards to handle prisoner petitions for commutation and pardons, effectively eliminating a role for elected officials who, for political reasons, are likely to sidestep this important and necessary element in criminal justice. With these types of serious reforms, the need to grant clemency as it was intended—to right a wrong—would not be as great as it is now.

But until we return to such sentencing sanity, justice requires that governors and the United States president at least consider clemency requests. That means that the public will need to reject the crude political machinations of finger-pointing candidates attempting to ride the wave of fear-mongering into elected office.

The challenges offenders face as they reenter society must—and can—be minimized without compromising public safety. Our system is not perfect and neither are those responsible for administering it. But justice requires that we try.

So many need their courage strengthened, so many are in despair and in need of consolation, there is so much harshness that needs a gentle hand and an illuminating word, so much loneliness crying out for a word of release, so much loss and pain in search of inner meaning.

Woe to an age when the voices of those who cry in the wilderness have fallen silent, outshouted by the noise of the day or outlawed or swallowed up in the intoxication of progress, or growing smothered and fainter for fear and cowardice. The devastation will soon be so terrifying and universal that the word “wilderness” will again strike our hearts and minds.

—Alfred Delp

Priest imprisoned and hanged for opposition to Hitler in 1945