The Campaign for Corrective Clemency seeks to convince Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker to exercise his executive clemency powers in an expansive manner to address the historical harms and injustices of mass incarceration, and thereby bring the state one step closer to being the beacon of humanity he said he seeks to turn Illinois into. With thousands of men and women in Illinois currently sentenced to death-by-incarceration, it's time for Governor Pritzker to use his powers to rectify the past injustices from which thousands of people continue to suffer.

In Illinois, the Governor possesses an essentially unreviewable power to grant clemency that is checked only by his own conscience. This gives him the ability to grant clemency to large groups of people, even if they haven't formally applied for clemency via the normal Illinois Prisoner Review Board process. We are calling on the Governor to use that power to do two things:

1. Grant everyone currently serving a sentence of Life-Without-Parole (LWOP) or de facto LWOP (40 years or more) parole eligibility after serving 15 or 20 years in prison; and

2. Grant everyone currently serving a number of years subject to the Truth-In-Sentencing (TIS) provisions a partial commutation/pardon on that portion of their sentence and order the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) to recalculate all such sentences under the 50% (day-for-day good time) standard, effectively abolishing TIS for anyone currently in prison.

The Governor would be more than justified in doing so. Mass incarceration in Illinois is both a product and producer of countless historical harms and injustices inflicted upon people who come into contact with Illinois' criminal legal system. A legal system rife with racial, political, and constitutional injustices feeds a prison system full of people whose continued incarceration serves no penological objective once they already have served a significant amount of time in prison and pose no threat to society.

The sheer amount of systemic injustices and historical harms means no one currently in prison serving a long sentence has escaped unscathed. 

Unfortunately, Illinois' General Assembly has failed to act to address the vast majority of these injustices, and even when it does, it refuses to pass retroactive legislation; meaning legislators will acknowledge the injustice, and protect people who commit crimes in the future, but refuse to provide any relief to the victims of the prior unjust law or policy. They do so solely for political reasons, thereby playing politics with people's lives.

We hereby call on Gov. Pritzker to use his power to bring relief to the over-incarcerated.

Gov. Pritzker would not be the first Illinois governor to use blanket clemency to cure an injustice. For example, Gov. Ryan commuted the sentences of all 167 people on death row due to the injustices inherent in the implementation of the death penalty. Just as Gov. Ryan cleared Illinois' former death row, Gov. Pritzker should clear Illinois' "slow-death row".

Blanket clemency was the humane thing to do then and it is the humane thing to do now.