After Donald Trump was elected to a second presidential term last November, someone in my housing unit at New Jersey State Prison (NJSP) shouted: “Here we go again!” The very next day, one of my neighbors, Rosario “Russ” Miraglia, said with a grin, “Hey, Tariq, I told you it was gonna happen.”
Indeed, weeks before the election, Russ—and many others in NJSP—had predicted that Trump would beat Kamala Harris by a landslide. They were thrilled when he comfortably defeated her—and they weren’t alone. In 2024, The Marshall Project partnered with Slate to survey incarcerated people across the country about the presidential election. Most respondents said that if given the chance, they would vote for Trump.
One of my fellow inmates conducted a straw poll of his own at NJSP. Ralph Kimpton, a sixty-year-old white Trump supporter, told me he polled the fifty-eight other prisoners in his compound about their voting preferences. According to Kimpton, thirty-one respondents voted for Trump, twenty-two for Harris, and two declined to vote.
Many folks on the outside might assume that incarcerated folks would be lamenting Trump’s win. After all, the only felon of whom he speaks admiringly is himself. While Trump has claimed to be a reformer on criminal justice, his record is mixed: He signed the First Step Act into law in 2018, which aimed to reduce sentences for some nonviolent offenders, but his administration also rolled back Obama-era policies phasing out private prisons and pushed for harsher penalties, including expanding the use of the death penalty. This is the man who called for the execution of the since-exonerated Central Park Five in 1989, taking out full-page ads in New York City newspapers to demand the return of the death penalty in New York. Trump has remained a steadfast supporter of the death penalty; in 2020, his administration carried out the first executions under the federal death penalty in seventeen years. Although Joe Biden had paused federal executions of death row prisoners during his presidency, Trump immediately resumed them at the beginning of his second term. He has even shown interest in sending U.S. prisoners—what he termed “homegrowns—to prisons in El Salvador, just as he has already done to hundreds of undocumented immigrants.
But while Trump’s record may speak for itself, many of us at NJSP are jaded by the alternative. After all, what has the Democratic establishment done for us?
Democrats have a subpar record when it comes to criminal justice reform. Over the past few decades, they’ve enacted some of the most brutal mandatory minimum sentencing schemes and sentencing disparities—policies that are still closely associated with big names in the Democratic Party establishment. Bill Clinton’s support for mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which restricted the use of early release for rehabilitation, resulted in mass incarceration of Black and brown populations. Biden was an architect of the notorious 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, disproportionately imprisoning Black people. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act created a one-hundred-to-one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, leading to mass incarceration of Black and brown Americans for minor crack offenses, while white users of powder cocaine faced far lighter penalties. The law, which Biden later called a “mistake,” devastated minority communities—by 1993, 88 percent of federal crack defendants were Black.
And then there’s Harris, California’s former Attorney General, who vehemently defended keeping the death penalty and fought to have some people executed despite ample evidence that cast doubt on their guilt. Sure, Biden commuted the federal death sentences of thirty-seven inmates, but he didn’t abolish the federal death penalty as he had promised to do during his 2020 presidential campaign. As such, the move felt like a hollow ploy to rehabilitate his shameful legacy on criminal justice laws, including his authorship of the 1994 crime bill, which expanded policing, disproportionately targeted Black communities, and fueled mass incarceration.
There’s also the corruption and abuse within the federal prison system, which often results in the punishment of prisoners rather than guards or other staff. While Biden signed a bill in 2024 strengthening oversight of the federal Bureau of Prisons, Democrats have generally done little to address prison conditions. They’ve continually promised bold criminal justice reform, but we’ve seen few results. Democrats have broken key promises—like failing to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, slow-walking clemency, and allowing federal prison populations to rise while still defending punitive policies like the death penalty. Even Biden’s ban on private prisons was undermined by loopholes exploited by the U.S. Marshals Service. Law enforcement departments around the country have paid millions of dollars to settle lawsuits detailing abuse, corruption, and wrongful acts by the hands of law enforcement personnel. There has still been no successful national political effort to curtail such abuses.
Instead, prisons have gotten even more brutal, conditions exacerbated by understaffing, inadequate oversight, and militarized tactics. Over the past twenty years, documented cases of abuse by law enforcement and corrections officers in U.S. prisons have surged, including excessive force, sexual violence, and systemic neglect. Mental health crises among inmates—often met with force rather than care—have also increased and are sometimes fatal, including related to the use of restraint and solitary confinement.
Alongside worsening conditions, prisons have also become more militarized, owing in large part to the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program. This program, enacted under Clinton with support from then-Senator Biden in 1996, provides surplus military equipment to civilian police departments and departments of corrections, arming them as if they were commandos. President Barack Obama’s restrictions on the transfer of military equipment failed to adequately curtail the 1033 Program, and were subsequently rolled back by Trump in 2017. When the Biden Administration expanded the list of prohibited equipment that could be used in the program in 2022, loopholes allowed transfers to continue. On Trump’s first day back in office in January, he rescinded Biden’s limited restrictions, allowing the program to operate unhindered.
Although Trump’s history with incarcerated folks is hardly sterling, he has taken a few stances on criminal justice issues that many find redeeming. During his first term, Trump pardoned Alice Marie Johnson from a life sentence for a first-time drug offense; in February 2025, he named her his “pardon czar,” or official adviser on clemency cases. When the news broke that Trump had pardoned all of the January 6 rioters shortly after his second Inauguration, NJSP was buzzing about Trump “keeping his promise,” as inmate Jose Morel put it.
But perhaps even more important is the fact that, to many of the “deplorables” stuck in the grips of the American justice system, Trump is one of our own in spirit, someone whose rejection of the status quo resonates with my fellow inmates, who see politics as a minefield of corruption and built-in exceptions for the elite. Yes, Trump is undeniably elite, but despite his wealth and status, he’s viewed as a black sheep among his fellow upper-crusters, as well as by Democrat-aligned titans of pop culture like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. On the inside, however, he’s seen as a fellow cut from the same cloth: a hustler. A lot of my friends see themselves in Trump—his uncouth way of communicating, his disdain for Hollywood and its trappings, his show of strength in the face of two attempted assassinations (which earned him instant street credit among the street hustlers here). Inside, he’s seen as a contrarian—a fighter. “He talks the talk and walks the walk,” says Morel, a Catholic immigrant in his sixties from the Dominican Republic.
For many of us on the inside, it seems as though the world has forgotten us—especially our own country. A lot of my fellow inmates like to gripe about the financial assistance provided to immigrants in contrast to the lack of money available in the often ignored, low-income communities where they grew up. And when the United States ships money to foreign lands to fight other countries’ wars, a common line of thinking among the incarcerated population goes, funds are inevitably cut from other areas, like funding for rehabilitative, educational, and vocational training on the inside. “We are not the world’s police—we’re not some charity,” Kimpton opines.
In contrast, many see Trump as a piggy bank, in part due to the stimulus checks he sent out—including to incarcerated people—during the COVID-19 pandemic, emblazoned with his unique signature. It was terrifying inside during that era; many of us died, and being deprived of family visits and kept in isolation felt like even more punishment. The checks, then, felt like miracles to a population that, on average, work for $1.50-$2.50 per day. It was perhaps the first time that everyone in NJSP felt included in the society at large—many prisoners were actually able to send gifts to their loved ones on the outside. My friend Manny, who asked that I withhold his full name, tells me that he gifted part of his check to his daughter. “I finally felt like a real dad,” he says.
In spite of their lives being impacted by the decisions of politicians, incarcerated people largely can’t vote. A 2024 report by The Sentencing Project estimated that four million people were unable to vote last year due to felony convictions—and that number is growing every year as more and more folks become incarcerated. While more left-leaning politicians like U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders have fought for our voting rights, many establishment Democrats like Biden have shied away from what they see as an unpopular idea. For instance, in 2021, 119 House Democrats voted with the GOP to defeat an amendment to an election reform bill that would have restored voting rights to incarcerated people. So, when a convicted felon stepped into our nation’s highest office, some of us felt a rare, if misguided, glimmer of hope.
A few days after the election, after I finished leading the Islamic prayers and was about to head to the weight room, my friend Jamel Carlton plopped down next to me on the NJSP gym floor. “Bro, since Donald Trump won, do we get to vote now, too?” he asked me. I paused, considering the beige walls under the buzzing fluorescent lights. It was a good question. Vermont and Maine are the only states that currently allow anyone to vote regardless of criminal conviction, but given that Trump is also a convicted criminal, why not? After all, Trump is nothing if not a contrarian. “Sure,” I told Jamel. “Who knows?”
All that said, do I really think Trump will be good for America, let alone incarcerated people? Probably not. As my friend Martin “Pancho” Robles points out, “A lot of incarcerated people wanted Trump to win, but they seem to forget that during his first term he said that he did not like criminals.”
Still, some of my friends remain hopeful, preferring to take a “wait and see” approach to Trump’s second term. Perhaps that’s the best course of action when it comes to the mercurial President, who never ceases to surprise us—for better or worse.
Given how little the Democrats have done little to help us, some of my friends have taken to thinking, “Well, it couldn’t get any worse.” In light of that, Trump seems worth a gamble. What do they got to lose?