On celebrating Trump’s conviction in our in-between time

I am a prison abolitionist. I was still thrilled that Donald Trump was convicted for his crimes.

I read Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? my freshman year of college. Her short book makes a compelling case for the abolition of prisons, and convinced me that we need to completely reimagine our criminal justice system. Davis draws a direct comparison between racialized chattel slavery and the prison industrial complex. She writes, “In the nineteenth century, antislavery activists insisted that as long as slavery continued, the future of democracy was bleak indeed. In the twenty-first century, antiprison activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the revitalization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the prison system.”

Fired up about the cause of abolition, I asked Rev. Al Sharpton—who was running for president at the time—during his visit to Temple University, if he supported the abolition of prisons. He argued for reform, not abolition. Not me; I was—and am—an abolitionist.

One of my reasons is that, as a follower of Jesus as Lord, I am called to imagine a world without violence. I believe Christians today can do their part to bring about that hopeful future, even if it feels very idealistic. The world doesn’t have to be this way. Jesus conquered death, and we all can do and be something different.

Nevertheless, we are in an in-between state. We are in our own Advent, if you will, as we await the Lord to return. Things are not as they should be, and we make compromises all of the time, despite our convictions. It’s challenging.

But life presents us with paradoxes at times that can be very uncomfortable.

I felt that pointedly last Thursday when Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts. A unanimous jury found him guilty of falsifying business records after making a (legal) “hush- money” payment to Stormy Daniels. The crime was in trying to conceal that payment in order to commit other crimes—including tax fraud, exceeding campaign finance limits, and illegally influencing the 2016 election.

I was elated. I was overjoyed. I couldn’t stop talking about it. I think Trump is a bad man who has harmed millions of people and it does feel satisfying that he was convicted. It’s a sign that our justice system still works, at least some of the time. Trump’s conviction as a felon makes him—in the view of many Americans—unfit for office. I implore all Democrats and the Biden Campaign to make that as clear to voters as possible (currently, they are very hesitant to do so).

All of this is to say that it feels a bit “messy” to hold out for the possibility of a new way of doing justice, while also celebrating the conviction of an evildoer.

Justice doesn’t always prevail in our system, of course. Sadly, Trump is right when calling the system broken. Unfortunately, he didn’t think so when it was broken for the disproportionate number of men and women of color it incarcerates. Perhaps we can agree that it’s right to acknowledge that even a deeply flawed system can sometimes get things right. I want to be able to hold onto some joy in Trump’s conviction, while also advocating the end of the carceral system.

None of us is as bad as the worst thing we’ve ever done, and too often the justice system treats people that way. Repentance and remorse—even when one is justly found guilty of a crime—is possible. Trump, with his self-dramatizing contempt for the judge and jury, and unwillingness to admit wrongdoing, makes it more difficult than usual to hope for remorse.

Trump is now a convicted felon whose crimes far exceed the ones for which he was found guilty last week. Among the three other cases coming up against him, the most serious is his attempt to alter the election results in Georgia.

While I don’t want to live in a society where political opponents are incarcerated, I do want to live in one where political leaders are subject to the law, like everyone else. Thursday’s verdict was a step in the right direction.

But I still hold out hope for a world where we have better ways of arriving at justice than our adversarial method–a world with another way to rehabilitate one another into the fullest versions of ourselves.

When our broken system occasionally gets it right, some relief—even joy—is in order.