OPINION: Reframing Redemption: The Prison-to-Presidential Pipeline Narrative

Accused of at least 26 counts of sexual misconduct, twice impeached, accused of allegedly inciting a riot, and still elected as the leader of the free world. What a feat, what a task, what a story of triumph, and honestly, what a story of life after criminality. To those who have engaged in criminal behavior and activity, this is your time to look in the mirror and decide that your life begins and ends when you choose.

Personally, I love the prison-to-presidential pipeline, and if those who champion the belief in creating and establishing a fair, just, and equitable justice system in the United States don’t begin using this case as the standard to re-enfranchise the millions of disenfranchised Americans who were told there was no life to be lived or gained after engaging in criminal activity, then I’ll have to mess around and start an organization on my own time.

Donald J. Trump being elected president of the United States, with all the allegations of criminality against him — convicted and alleged — why shouldn’t we see this as a win for one of the sects of our most neglected population? The previously incarcerated. This entire scenario opens the floodgates to an incredible discussion about what rehabilitation and assimilation into society can and should look like.

Perhaps this looks like starting at the grassroots level and creating spaces to discuss the experiences of prison, criminality, and the desire to become something or do something different while living under the crushing weight of a society that stigmatizes and tells you that you are worthless once you’ve committed a crime.

Having spoken to a convicted felon directly after the election, he said, “The reason I never wanted to work for someone ever again after doing five months in The Feds was that I never wanted to tick that box that read, ‘felon.’” Consider that this person was convicted of a federal crime in 2007, and it is now 2024. For the past 17 years, he chose to work strictly for himself and build his own business rather than be re-branded as a criminal whenever he filled out a job application.

Can you imagine having to re-tell your story every time you try to move to another stepping stone in life because of one mistake you made years prior? The 13th Amendment made it so that anyone who committed a crime or was convicted of a crime reverted to being a slave. With such archaic — not to mention barbaric — rules still dictating people’s livelihoods, you expect there needs to be a significant shift that forces a change of narrative. Why not let that shift be electing a cut-and-dry criminal to the highest employment position within “the greatest country on earth,” our beloved United States of America?

As someone who has never been convicted of a crime or gone to prison, I am the child of someone who has been. I wonder how different his life, my life, my family’s life could have been had he been able to pursue life without the metaphorical noose around his neck. It begins with fighting for currently incarcerated people's right to vote from jail and allowing all previously incarcerated individuals across all states the right to vote in general.

There needs to be a nationwide discussion to destigmatize what it means to be a person who committed a crime, and we need to reframe the thought process of letting a singular negative experience dictate the rest of your life (within reason, of course). That will involve building an authentic and robust reintegration piece into the criminal justice system so that people aren’t thrown out of the prison gates and told to figure it out. But is America ready to deconstruct how we view criminality, and are those labeled as criminals prepared to rally, not necessarily for what they needed, but for what generations after them deserve? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.