People with criminal records react to Trump’s conviction: ‘Now you understand’

Some Democratic leaders are eager to bring former President Donald J. Trump’s new identity as a convicted felon to voters to explain why he is unfit for office. At the same time, the left has been agitating for years to end the stigma of a criminal record and point out serious issues in the country’s legal system.

That’s why the news last week that a New York jury had found Mr. Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records set off an especially complex and personal reaction among millions of Americans who have also been convicted of serious crimes.

They debated whether the former president’s conviction makes him one of them or merely underscores how different he is from them, and they discussed their mixed emotions upon hearing him discuss the consequences of criminalizing an entire country.

“He’s been convicted, so now he’s in our community,” said Raheem Buford, 53, who also has a felony conviction on his record.

Mr. Buford believes that neither Democrats nor Republicans have done enough to reform key parts of the U.S. criminal justice system, which is broken, including wrongful convictions, racial disparities and incarceration rates that are far higher than those in other industrialized nations.

So he wondered if sharing a label with the leader of the Republican Party might not, in some way, help his cause.

,Will he go to jail? I doubt it. Will it change his lifestyle? I doubt it,” said Mr. Buford, who founded the organization Unheard Voices Outreach for formerly incarcerated people in Nashville. “But I know it will give him — what he’s already got — an experience he’ll never forget. Because once you go through the criminal legal system and you’re prosecuted, it’s traumatic.”

He added: “Now you at least understand a little bit how it feels.”

For Dawn Harrington, who served time on New York’s Rikers Island and now directs an organization called Free Hearts for families affected by incarceration in Tennessee, watching the news coverage of Mr. Trump’s criminal conviction last week was upsetting.

He heard liberals rejoice that he is now a “convicted felon,” a term he and others have tried to persuade people not to use.

Ms. Harrington said she went to jail for gun possession after traveling to New York with a handgun registered in Tennessee. She said she is from a part of Nashville that has a high level of incarceration, and her brother has also been to prison.

Following Trump’s verdict, they also heard President Biden defend the justice system as “the cornerstone of America” that has stood for “nearly 250 years” — from a time, as Ms. Harington said, when slavery was legal.

He added that “this rhetoric, in his view, was clearly inauthentic to the base with which we organize.”

At the same time, Ms. Harrington said, the group chat she is in began to have conversations about what it was like to see national news outlets discuss “permanent punishments,” such as the loss of voting rights. Criminal convictions often become barriers to getting jobs and housing, and prevent people from voting, owning guns and pursuing certain careers.

An estimated 77 million Americans have some sort of criminal record, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another estimate puts the number at about 20 million people convicted of serious crimes.

The differences between Mr. Trump and most Americans convicted of serious crimes are stark, as are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately black, Latino and Native American. Criminal cases reaching trial are extremely rare; most cases are settled through plea bargains.

Mr. Trump is running for the nation’s highest office, and prosecutors in the case argued that he defrauded the American people by falsifying business documents to conceal payments to a porn star.

Mr Trump, who now lives in Florida, is not expected to be affected by some of the usual consequences. Some legal experts said he is likely to retain his voting rights, unlike other Florida residents convicted of felonies, because they were convicted in a different state.

“She’s now charged with a serious crime, but that doesn’t mean she’s one of us,” said David Ayala, who lives in Orlando, Florida. He said his last conviction was in 2000 for conspiracy to sell drugs but still can’t go on school field trips with his daughters. “She has a lot of resources. She has privilege.”

Yet Mr. Ayala recognized an opportunity to make criminal justice a bigger issue. “We have a former president here who feels he didn’t get a fair trial,” he said. “So what does that say about our justice system?”

Also, Mr. Ayala cannot forget that Mr. Trump took out full-page newspaper ads urging New York to reinstate the death penalty after a group of black and Latino teenagers were arrested in connection with the rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989. The teenagers, who became known as the Central Park Five, were later acquitted and the real culprit was identified.

Mr. Ayala said it was difficult to craft a statement about Trump’s sentencing 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 words like “criminal” and “convicted criminal” to describe Mr. Trump, but stopped short of endorsing him. “He has a lot of characteristics that are completely opposite of our views,” Mr. Ayala said, referring to Mr. Trump’s record on race.

Mr. Buford, who lives in Nashville, has been less cautious in his hopes of taking advantage of the opportunity. He served 26 years in prison for killing a man during an armed robbery at age 19, and he knows that political will can be very different when it comes to people whose crimes, like Mr. Trump’s, were nonviolent.

“Now we have a different story,” he said. “President Biden could do mass clemency right now. I think that could change things for us if we strategize and think big and keep our personal emotions out of it.”