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I am an abolitionist. I believe that we, as a society, should do away with the carceral criminal justice system. I am against policing, prisons and the death penalty. And yet, when the news of former president Donald Trump’s indictment broke, I found myself completely fine with it. Does that make me a hypocrite? I don’t think so.
I do believe that the criminal justice system, at least as it exists today, needs to be done away with. We live in an era of mass incarceration. I don’t think anyone could seriously argue that mass incarceration has deterred crime and antisocial behavior. We know that the war on drugs, which began under former president Richard Nixon’s administration, was a ploy used to target Black people and those who opposed and fought against the United States’s war crimes in Vietnam. Nixon’s White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman admitted it on tape. We know that private prisons are incentivized to keep as many people incarcerated as humanly possible, not to rehabilitate them. We know that the police function to protect the capitalist class, that they evolved from forces that hunted down and brought back escaped enslaved people, that they do not prevent crime or stop shootings (see Uvalde, Texas) and that too many unarmed people—who are disproportionately Black and/or disabled—have been shot and killed by officers who know they’ll get away with it.
At the same time, we see wealthy and powerful business leaders, politicians, law enforcement officials and even just plain old rich white kids get away with doing, largely, whatever they damn well please. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will get away with their numerous violations of labor law in their efforts to prevent unionization at their companies. Schultz even smirked and shook his head as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) laid out his violations of the law during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing. While soldiers such as William Calley and Sabrina Harman were punished for war crimes in Vietnam and Iraq, as they should have been, why were former presidents Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush never held accountable for telling the lies that got us into those wars? More recently, the case of Brock Turner makes it very clear that the criminal justice system does not work. Turner, a white Stanford athlete from a wealthy background who committed an act of rape, was sentenced to six months in jail, while the same judge sentenced a Latino man who committed the same crime to a three-year prison sentence.
So, when I heard that Trump might go to jail, it felt like justice, even though it really wasn’t. Trump will not be handed a serious prison sentence. He will not be held accountable for sexual assault or rape, for war crimes in Iran or Afghanistan, or for his many corrupt actions in and out of office. He may get a light prison sentence. My happiness over Trump’s indictment is pure schadenfreude, which is okay, but we should recognize it for what it is.
And let’s be honest. Donald Trump is not the only president who should be indicted. Former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and the rest of them all committed crimes against humanity as president. Yeah, even Jimmy Carter. Every president in our history has blood on their hands. This doesn’t mean Trump shouldn’t be held accountable, but we should be honest about what presidential accountability looks like.
Instead of incarceration, we should seek to build a society where needs are met, where mental health is taken seriously and where we do not have such easy access to weaponry. If we do not fight crime at the root causes, we will be stuck in an endless cycle of locking up more and more people. That applies to wealthy criminals too. Instead of locking up Trump, Schultz, Bezos and the like, we should seek to change the system so that greedy individuals cannot exploit it to the point where they have more money and power than they could possibly ever use.
I will not be advocating for Trump’s release from jail, if he ends up going. But let’s not dilute the word “accountability” either. Accountability for Trump would look like dismantling the system that got him elected in the first place. If we don’t do that, another Trump is inevitable.