President Trump doesn’t use his pardon power often, but when he does, he abuses it for all it’s worth. In less than four years in office, Trump has made a mockery of mercy, doling out clemency to some of the most deplorable people in the country, an alarming number of whom happen to be his friends, while ignoring tens of thousands of more deserving applicants.

On Wednesday, Trump once again granted pardons to some of his closest allies: Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman; Roger Stone, his long-time confidant; and Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. These grants, along with 26 others, followed 20 Trump issued a day earlier, many to a rogues’ gallery of wrongdoers who shouldn’t have been on anyone’s mercy list. These included four Blackwater security guards convicted in connection with the killing of Iraqi civilians, three corrupt Republican former members of Congress and two figures who pleaded guilty as part of the special counsel’s Russia investigation.

Sure, Trump has tossed a bone to a few people sentenced under outrageously harsh threestrikes laws, like Weldon Angelos, who got 55 years in prison for selling marijuana while carrying a handgun. But those are the exceptions. In general, if you are not a xenophobic sheriff, a right-wing troll, a homicidal military officer, an old friend or a turkey, your odds of being pardoned by this president hover around zero.

What makes Trump’s clemency record even worse is how paltry it is. As the old joke goes, the food is terrible, and the portions are too small. To date, Trump has issued a not-so-grand total of 94 pardons and sentence commutations — fewer than any president but George H.W. Bush in more than 100 years. He may add a few more to that list, of course, if only by pre-emptively pardoning his lawyers and family members.

Trump’s stingy, self-serving approach to clemency is due in part to his transactional view of the law as something to punish his enemies and to protect himself, his friends and his allies. But it’s a power that is easy to abuse because it is nearly unlimited. While Trump may be the most flagrant abuser, he’s far from the first. From Bill Clinton’s pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich to Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor Richard Nixon, there are plenty of examples of presidents of both parties exploiting mercy for dubious reasons. The solution isn’t for presidents to pardon fewer people; it’s to pardon more, with more consideration and more consistency.

As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take over, he has the opportunity to reimagine this deeply important but long-abused power and make it work more as the founders intended: as a counterweight to unjust prosecutions and excessive punishments. If ever there was a moment to reform the system, it is now. The decades-old American prison crisis has dumped millions of people behind bars, many suffering under hugely disproportionate sentences. Last summer, the nation was engulfed by mass protests over criminal-justice abuses, and prisons continue to endure many of the nation’s worst coronavirus outbreaks. Recent federal laws, including one signed by Trump, have alleviated some of the most egregious sentences, but they haven’t done nearly enough. There are currently nearly 14,000 clemency petitions waiting for action. And unlike so many other parts of the federal government, clemency is one area in which presidents can do a lot of good on their own, and fast.

First and most important: Take back control of the pardon process. The power to grant mercy may be the president’s alone, but the office of the pardon attorney operates out of the Justice Department. Under most administrations, before any request for clemency can land on the president’s desk, it has to survive review by a gantlet of people whose job it is to win convictions, not undo them. In some cases, the same prosecutors who sent a person to prison are asked to weigh in on granting that person mercy. Prosecutors’ built-in biases are exacerbated by the fear of public blowback if any grant of clemency goes wrong — say, if a person commits a crime after being granted relief. The gulf between presidents and their pardon decisions has confounded executives of both parties.

One of the last pieces of advice the outgoing President George W Bush gave the incoming President Barack Obama was to pick a pardon policy and stick to it.

Obama didn’t heed the warning.

He dithered for years before finally developing clear clemency standards late in his second term. The result: mercy for more than 1,900 people, many of them serving absurdly long sentences for low-level drug crimes. That was very good, but as long as the Justice Department maintains control over the process, it easily reverts to form. It’s not enough simply to bring pardons back into the White House.

Trump’s near total disregard of any process shows the danger in that. Instead, Osler proposes the establishment of a clemency board or commission with a direct line to the president, and staffed with experts in the field of criminal justice rather than with politicians worried about how their decisions might affect their electoral prospects. Board members should reflect the nation’s diversity in terms of race, geography and political ideology. Nearly all states incorporate the work of a board or commission in their clemency processes; not coincidentally, states generally do a much better job of handling their petitions than the federal government does.

Biden could create and staff a clemency board by executive order. He could also avoid Obama’s mistake by laying out clear, consistent standards for considering petitions early in his administration. What the Justice Department currently considers — the seriousness of the crime, whether the offender has expressed remorse and shown rehabilitation — is reasonable, but it often isn’t reflected in clemency decisions. (Certainly not those of Trump.) Congress has an important role to play too.

The pardon power is vast but not without limits.

For instance, presidents may not violate core constitutional rights with their pardons, dangle pardons as a way to evade the justice system or offer mercy in exchange for bribes. Some constitutional scholars say they may not pardon themselves, although no president has yet tried to. To remind presidents that they are being watched, Congress can require the White House to issue a regular clemency report, as many states require as part of their process. It may also investigate individual pardons for possible abuse, as it did after Clinton’s pardon of Rich. And it can impose consequences, up to and including impeachment. Real reform is likely to come from Biden, who has his own amends to make. As a senator, Biden helped draft and championed many of the harshest federal criminal-sentencing laws of the 80s, ’90s, laws that drove the nation’s prison crisis in the first place. He can’t undo the damage these federal laws have inflicted, but he can begin to repair it, and his own legacy on this issue, by reforming the pardon power from the ground up.