Earlier this week, President Obama broke his own remarkable clemency record, granting an unprecedented 231 commutations and pardons in a single day. Headlines and tweets broadcast the historic tally; on the White House website, a bar graph tracks Obama’s record to date, which has dramatically outpaced that of his predecessors. With a total of 1,176 recipients, the White House boasted, Obama has granted clemency “more than the last 11 presidents combined.”

The president certainly deserves credit for making clemency a priority before leaving office. His efforts are especially laudable in contrast to the lazy rhetoric of President-elect Donald Trump, who has cluelessly condemned clemency recipients as “bad dudes.” In reality, to use language Trump might understand, all successful applicants go through a process of extreme vetting: only a fraction of people in federal prison are eligible in the first place, and selections rely on a careful review of each candidate’s history and behavior behind bars. A record of violence, including as a juvenile, is disqualifying.

Those who make the cut are, as the White House put it this week, “individuals deserving of a second chance.” Many have been serving long mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, crimes for which they have shown remorse. Applications list courses completed, prison jobs maintained, records untarnished by disciplinary write-ups. Last spring, Obama highlighted a handful of men and women who “have made the most of their second chances,” describing their ability to leave prison, get a job, and piece their lives back together as “extraordinary.”

With his legacy and the politics of crime in mind, it makes sense that Obama would be cautious with his commutations, while amplifying the success stories. Yet there’s something disingenuous in the now-familiar rhetoric peddled by the White House with every clemency announcement, which repeatedly tells us we are a “nation of second chances.” Even within the narrow scope of Obama’s clemency initiative — and putting aside his treatment of immigrants and whistleblowers — this is wishful thinking at best. As Obama himself has written in his congratulatory letters to clemency recipients, “thousands of individuals have applied for commutation, and only a fraction of these applications are approved.” Before the latest round of pardons and commutations, Obama had rejected nearly 14,000 clemency applications. On the Department of Justice website, which tracks the rejections, the staggering list of names includes Ferrell Scott, whose application was denied on November 29. Scott is serving life without parole for pot offenses — precisely the kind of draconian sentence clemency exists to address.

Obama’s clemency project was ostensibly born of the recognition that, as then-Attorney General Eric Holder put it in 2013, “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.” At the time, Holder promised the Obama administration was “fundamentally rethinking the notion of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes.” But when it comes to the president’s pardon power — the one place where Obama could directly address the problem — there are few signs of a transformation.

Instead, the White House has promoted a story about exceptionalism: The president has proven exceptionally merciful and the clemency recipients are uniquely deserving — even extraordinary. If the former is true, it is only because we have set the bar so low. As for the latter, it is certainly no small thing to survive — even thrive — while serving some of the harshest prison sentences in the world. But praising such men and women as exceptional diminishes the vast human potential that exists behind bars. As one clemency recipient told me last month, recalling an exchange with the former White House pardon attorney, “I have a list of names of people I would like to see come home. But there are even more people who I’ve never met. To give a list of names would exclude too many people.”

On November 29, a coalition of activists, legal scholars, and attorneys published a letter urging Obama to take much bolder action, to commute the sentences of whole categories of people whose prison terms are plainly unjust. He could, for instance, prioritize the cases of people who should have received retroactive relief under the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, which reduced (but did not abolish) the obscene sentencing disparities for crimes involving crack versus powder cocaine. “There is bipartisan agreement that pre-Fair Sentencing Act crack sentences are unjust and have disproportionately affected people of color,” the authors wrote, “but there is no mechanism for addressing that injustice outside of clemency.” Whether Obama will act on such ideas remains to be seen. But the letter exposed the fallacy of framing clemency as a “second chance” to be bestowed upon a small number of “deserving” individuals. If the underlying sentences were senseless and cruel to begin with — and if clemency is the only way to grant relief — why has the White House made it so hard for these same people to get out of prison?

This is just one of a nagging set of larger questions highlighted by Obama’s clemency initiative. In an era in which so many politicians now recognize the need to correct the excesses of mass incarceration, why should the burden fall on incarcerated people? How is it reasonable to require people in prison — the most disempowered individuals in society, living in state-imposed environments of extreme violence — not only to survive but to excel in order to win relief from a punishment the government itself has admitted was wrong? Should someone serving a draconian sentence under a racist sentencing scheme really have to work so hard to prove their worth when it was the state that robbed them of their humanity?

