Who Pays for Pardons?

For the moment the proposals have subsided that President Ford might pardon not just Richard Nixon, but all those linked to the Watergate crimes. But the outraged response to the initial report offers the opportunity to ask ourselves about the profound problem of apportioning expiation, and indeed all the social costs incurred throughout a high-technology society.

Those who study the physical as well as the moral universe insist that every action causes a reaction, that the ripples and reverberations caused by molecular collisions, industrial wastes, or political trends may not be immediately evident but are nonetheless pervasive. The cosmos seems to require a balancing of all accounts. There is no such thing as a “free lunch,” ecologists as well as prophets warn us. Whether we like it or not, there is always the price to be paid for each overextension, good or bad, beyond Nature’s balances.

In simpler days a farmer reaped the consequences of his own achievements or mistakes in agriculture. Nowadays it is far more complex. One of the grim requisites of western civilization’s ever-accelerating progress is that much of the social costs of innovation be ignored, postponed, diffused, or otherwise rendered imperceptible. The Industrial Revolution in England, for instance, began modestly enough. It remained for artists such as Hogarth, Goldsmith, and Dickens to lay bare the mounting toll exacted in human misery. Ten years ago America’s leaders claimed we could fight a prolonged war in Indochina without inconvenience on the home front, but now we know the price tag included a polarized citizenry and escalating inflation. Today there is talk of solving our energy crisis by taking oil from huge beds of shale underlying our heartland. But the extraction process itself will consume vast amounts of energy and could neither be considered profitable nor even yield a net gain in energy produced, unless one conveniently understates the obligation to restore and recontour the land afterwards (see Between the Lines, June 1, 1974).

Furthermore it is characteristic of advanced societies that those who initiate what is termed “progress” are tacitly “pardoned” from bearing much of the social cost. Entrepreneurs who pollute the air, for instance, rarely live where they must breathe it. But in actuality the human consequences are not pardoned after all, under Nature’s austere rule; instead they are passed on in other, often hidden ways. The trick is to apportion the social cost to those who can least protect themselves or articulate effective protest—i.e., the poor, the elderly, the marginated, and the generations yet unborn. Yes, retribution in broad terms is inevitable, but society contracts to allow some at least to dodge it so that progress may continue. Accordingly, others necessarily have their burden increased. By definition “the privileged” are those excused from the bulk of the social costs of their achievements. Others must pay for the pardon.

This is a grave, perhaps fatal, dilemma for a high technology society, whose very complexity makes it ever more difficult to trace lines of personal responsibility, factor out the true costs, and in effect send the bill to those who ought to join in paying. It may be easy to assign blame for an offshore oil spill. But who ought to pay, and in what degree, for various environmental pollutions? In Newark, New Jersey, for instance, a recent study shows some of the cost of leaving lead in gasoline is being paid by children. There the incidence of lead poisoning is found to be largely correlated with living close to heavy traffic arteries. Even more complex are the monstrous tidal forces of racism and rampant consumerism, originating long ago and steadily eroding our national health. Of whom should reparations be exacted, and in what proportions? It is far simpler to duck the question, but in the long run the moral assessments levied by God and Nature must be paid. For injustice, the accumulated weight of ill-distributed social debits for power used and abused will finally disintegrate a society.

One might suppose that the area of criminal justice, at least, is one place where moral cost accounting is still revered by the public. The cry for “law and order,” properly understood, can be a healthy sign of national conscience, an admission that human behavior must be held accountable. Ideally, any and all who are guilty of injury to our corporate life must to that extent render fair recompense.

But also in criminal justice the social costs are too narrowly conceived. A criminal may be convicted and sent to jail, but this hardly benefits his victim. Until recently, few questioned the fact that the victim has to stand good for his losses, in effect subsidizing his own abuse, without compensation from the rest of society. Moreover, does society itself have a degree of responsibility for the criminal’s act? In a recent provocative essay (“Expiation as a Theoretical Perspective on Prison Reform,” in Religion and Social Sciences: 1973 Proceedings, American Academy of Religion), Keith D. Stephenson and John F. Else suggest that in early cultures both a transgressor and his society joined in a common expiation to restore group harmony, but that today the convicted criminal alone is required to atone. Even in their symbolic details, “prison rebellions can be seen…as attempts to rectify the inequitable division of expiatory responsibility” (p. 21).

Nor is justice evenhanded even among those tried and convicted. Again, the privileged are often excused, at least partially, which means a default on moral debts that adds further strain on the social fabric. In his column of Sept. 10, 1974, Jack Anderson gives substance to the long suspicion that “it helps to be a government bigwig, Mafia don, labor leader, or White House intimate at sentencing time.” Citing a statistical survey by Edward Browder, he states that prominent white-collar criminals average a little over two years in prison, regardless of how much they stole, and about 20 percent need spend no time in jail at all. By contrast, bank robbers averaged 11 year sentences for stealing far smaller amounts. In fact, noted white-collar criminals averaged only about one year in prison for every $10 million stolen. Not a bad investment, some might say.

Obviously this brings us to the leniency proposed for or already shown to Watergate offenders, as well as Mr. Agnew. When one compares this trend to the long prison sentences at this very moment endured by thousands upon thousands of those who are black or poor, and for relatively minor offences, can one speak of “equal justice” with a straight face? Clearly the privileged are honored with loopholes—explicitly in their income taxes, and implicitly in the enforcement of other laws.

Granted, the motive now invoked for Watergate clemency is “mercy” rather than justice. But this appears to assume that mercy supersedes justice, indeed that the moral calculus of liabilities can be suspended by executive fiat. But Christians know better (or ought to). Cheap grace is a major heresy in our churches, and now we see its secular counterpart: cut-rate mercy. It is true that Christ’s atonement is all-sufficient, that redemption occurs by grace alone, but it is concurrently true that God is just and that salvation is ineffectual without radical repentance. “God is not mocked,” and mercy does not leave justice in arrears. Even Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross did not cancel out the demands of justice, but instead showed God decisively turning upon Himself the terrible price to be paid for man’s injustices.

But to advocate pardon or even leniency for Watergate criminals is not mercy, but outright favoritism. In trying to ignore the social cost entailed by every human act, such a proposal really only slips into the old habit of transferring the cost back to those who can least defend themselves against it. A presidential pardon would largely remove the unexpiated onus from the shoulders of both those pardoned and the pardoner, and would instead diffuse it and pass it on to the public, the very ones most victimized by these scandals. Again the victims are charged for the privilege of having been assaulted. The price the average citizen would be asked to pay would be at least twofold: first, the loss of the last hope that we shall know what really happened in the Watergate-related events and who is responsible, and secondly, the despair—perhaps eventually violent—that mounts from the ability to habitually overlook society’s double standards.

This is just the kind of liability a high-technology society can least afford, as it staggers under the weight and tension of previously deferred or misappropriated costs of progress. The general public would now also be asked to subsidize the cheap grace offered governmental officials who betrayed the common trust. But in the economy of creation, someone must finally pay, physically and morally, for all the pardons granted by an overextended civilization. Could it be that this stupendous cost is somehow included with all those “higher prices” to which we are frequently now asked to become accustomed?

The treatment of Watergate offenders, plus the extent to which all of us deal with the conditions that continue to produce Watergates, will comprise a barometer of whether we may be able also to grapple with the larger dilemmas of apportioning social costs—before it is too late.

G. Clarke Chapman, Jr. was Associate Professor of Religion at Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pa., when this article appeared.