Interesting. At first I thought banning parole makes sense (instead of max sentence + parole give a reasonable term) but apparently the reason is people stopped believing criminals can be rehabilitated via prison:

> Americans became more concerned with ensuring that people were punished – often severely – and began to doubt that prison could rehabilitate a person. The SRA rejected rehabilitation as the primary goal of our sentencing system. Instead, it stated that the purpose of imprisonment is punishment.

I suspect that it is out of the question, because the president would suffer from a lot of political blowback if a pardon was issued. Any president would have to gain something greater than the cost of that blowback. What would be the upside?