As an imprisoned Donald Trump becomes ever more likely, people on the other side of the criminal justice system debated what it would take to get him there — and why he would deserve it.
“He went out and got himself a real mob lawyer in [Rudy] Giuliani,” an imprisoned Chicago man who goes by “Po’ Boy” told VICE.
“If he don’t go to jail for all the crimes, and I mean all the crimes he’s committed, then no one should ever say we have equal justice in this country,” Po’Boy said. “Let’s keep it real: Trump’s worse than any dope dealer or white-collar criminal in here. He makes Bernie Madoff look like a saint.
Po’ Boy, who is doing time for a parole violation and asked the website to not use his real name for fear of retribution, said that he’s sickened by the double standard between the conservative treatment of “a real criminal” like Trump and former President Barack Obama.
“As a black man who was proud to have Obama as president and sick to see how Fox News treated him,” he said, “I now watch how Fox treats Trump—a real criminal—and it makes me sick.”
“Show Boat,” an ex-cop imprisoned for robbery, said that he wants “to see Trump go to prison.”
“We have a president whose entire life has been a con,” he told VICE, “and he was so good at it that he conned his way into the White House, aided by a poor Democratic presidential candidate and foreign governments.”
Although many of the imprisoned people VICE interviewed for the article agreed that the president appears to have broken laws, “the prevailing sentiment was that despite how bad it may look for Trump, he’ll never be locked up,” the report noted.
“There would have to be some kind of protective custody situation, even in low-security prisons,” Jeremey Fontanez, a man serving a life sentence for murder and robbery in West Virginia, told VICE.
Fontanez noted that although it seems ridiculous to consider a Secret Service detail in federal prison, he “wouldn’t put it past them.”