Some Democratic leaders are eager to make former President Donald Trump’s new identity as a convicted felon central to their pitch to voters about why he is unfit for office. At the same time, there has been a movement on the left for years to end the stigma of criminal records and point out serious problems in the country’s justice system.
That’s why, in the wake of last week’s news that a New York jury had found Trump guilty of 34 felonies for falsifying corporate documents, there were especially complex and personal reactions among the millions of Americans who also face crimes convicted.
They discussed whether the former president’s convictions made him one of them or merely underscored how different he was, and discussed their mixed feelings about hearing an entire country talk about the consequences of having a criminal record.
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“He was convicted, so now he’s part of our community,” said Rahim Buford, 53, who also has a felony conviction.
Buford believes that neither Democrats nor Republicans have done enough to address significant parts of America’s criminal justice system that are broken, including wrongful convictions, racial disparities and incarceration rates that far exceed those of other industrialized countries .
That’s why he wondered if sharing a label with the leader of the Republican Party wouldn’t help his cause somehow.
“Will he go to jail? I doubt it. Will it change his lifestyle? I doubt it,” said Buford, who founded the organization Unheard Voices Outreach for the formerly incarcerated in Nashville, Tennessee. ‘But what I know for sure is that it will give him – he has already had – an experience he can never forget. Because once you go through the criminal justice system and end up in court, it’s traumatizing.”
He added: “Now you understand, at least a little bit, what it feels like.”
For Dawn Harrington, who served time on Rikers Island in New York and now heads an organization called Free Hearts for families affected by incarceration in Tennessee, watching the news coverage of Trump’s criminal conviction last week was unsettling.
She heard liberals rejoice that he was now a “convicted felon,” a term she and others have tried to convince people not to use.
Harrington said she spent time on gun ownership after traveling to New York with a handgun registered in Tennessee. She comes from an incarcerated part of Nashville, she said, and her brother was also in prison.
After Trump’s verdict, she also heard President Joe Biden defend the justice system as a “cornerstone of America” that has lasted “almost 250 years” — back to a time, Harrington noted, when slavery was legal.
The rhetoric, she thought, was “frankly dehumanizing to the base we organize through,” she said.
At the same time, Harrington said, a group chat she is part of erupted into a conversation about what it was like to see national news media discussing “permanent punishments” such as losing the right to vote. Criminal convictions often pose an obstacle to finding work and housing, and deter people from voting, owning guns and pursuing certain careers.
An estimated 77 million Americans have some kind of criminal record, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. By another estimate, nearly 20 million people have been convicted of crimes.
There are many differences between Trump and the vast majority of Americans convicted of crimes, who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately black, Latino and Native American. It is rare for a criminal case to even go to trial; most are resolved through settlement agreements.
Trump is running for the nation’s highest office, and prosecutors in the case argued that he deceived the American people by falsifying business documents to cover up hush money payments to a porn actor.
Few of the typical consequences are expected to affect Trump, who now lives in Florida. Some legal experts said he would likely retain his right to vote, unlike most other Floridians convicted of felonies, because he was convicted in another state.
“Just because he now has a felony conviction doesn’t make him one of us,” said David Ayala, who lives in Orlando, Florida, and said his last criminal conviction, for conspiracy to sell drugs in 2000, made him one of us. still refrained from accompanying his daughters on school trips. “He has had access to sufficient resources. He has a privilege.”
Still, Ayala saw an opportunity to make criminal justice a bigger problem. “Here we have a former president who believes he did not receive a fair trial,” he said. “What does that say about our legal system?”
At the same time, Ayala cannot forget that after a group of black and Latino teenagers were arrested in connection with the 1989 rape of a jogger in Central Park, Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling on New York to reinstate the death penalty. . The teenagers, who became known as the Central Park Five, were later acquitted and the real perpetrator was identified.
Ayala said it was difficult to make a statement about Trump’s conviction on behalf of the Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People and Families Movement, a network of groups he leads.
The group’s leaders wanted to warn against using terms like “felon” and “convicted criminal” for Trump, but without giving the impression that they supported him. “He has so many characteristics that are completely against what we stand for,” Ayala said, citing Trump’s record on race.
Buford, in Nashville, was less cautious in his hopes of capitalizing on the moment. He served 26 years for killing a man during an armed robbery when he was 19, and he knows that political will can be very different when it comes to people whose transgressions, like Trump’s, were nonviolent.
“We have a different story now,” he said. “President Biden could now offer enormous clemency. I think it can change things for us if we strategize, think bigger and leave our personal feelings out of it.”
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