Andrew Harnik/AP

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump appear on the third day of the Republican National Convention at Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine in Baltimore on Aug. 26, 2020.

“Presidential power,” wrote the scholar Richard Neustadt, “is the power to persuade.” 

President Donald Trump may be putting that time-honored observation to the acid test, running for reelection in a nation beset by epic challenges. A chief executive with lesser powers of persuasion might be crushed by the turmoil taking place on his watch – a pandemic that has killed 180,000 Americans, double-digit unemployment, racial unrest, and increasingly routine weather extremes that many link to climate change. 

But President Trump is no ordinary American leader. As he demonstrated time and again in his business career, he has an uncanny ability to survive and even thrive amid adversity. His skills as a salesman and showman are his superpower, and over the next two-plus months – including Thursday night, when he formally accepts the Republican presidential nomination – he will deploy them to the hilt. 

Mr. Trump has for the most part been campaigning on the same themes he ran on in 2016: “Make America Great Again” and “drain the swamp” – that is, uproot the entrenched elites. Despite the fact that he’s now the incumbent, he’s really still an outsider, in his telling. 

“He’s demonizing the same people: immigrants, foreigners, the media,” says Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “It’s essentially a replay of the message that put him in the White House in 2016 – barely, but it worked. There’s a natural tendency to go back to what worked before.”

Historians see efforts to emulate President Ronald Reagan, another disruptor who won the White House twice, on the argument that he needed two terms to effect his conservative “revolution.” Others see parallels with President Richard Nixon, who ran on “law and order” amid the tumult of 1968, though he was not the incumbent president. 

At this point, Mr. Trump has been in office more than three and a half years. Despite the nation’s massive challenges, he and his surrogates are pitching a positive message: He made America great once, and he can do it again. Or as Vice President Mike Pence put it Monday, “We’re going to make America great again ... again!” 

The president’s economic message centers on the low unemployment, robust growth, and reduced taxes and regulation that were the hallmarks of his record before the coronavirus hit. Blame for the pandemic lands squarely with others, Mr. Trump says: China, where the virus originated, and with the Democratic mayors and governors who failed to halt its spread. 

Andrew Harnik/AP

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump appear at a surprise visit at Fort McHenry in Baltimore yesterday, after attending the third day of the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Vice President Mike Pence delivered a speech at the Baltimore monument in which he accepted his party's nomination and called for "law and order" amid racial unrest.

Mr. Trump also portrays Democrats in Congress, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as villains (they offer the same assessment of him), amid a three-week hiatus in talks with the White House over more aid for struggling Americans. Thursday afternoon, Speaker Pelosi and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows were reportedly set to resume negotiations on the next COVID-19 relief package.

Still, it’s a much more complicated message than in 2016 – since many of the problems the president is promising to solve have occurred on his own watch. 

“He is trying to point to the chaos and confusion that is 2020 America, and then divorce himself from any responsibility for the chaos and confusion – then argue that he’s the solution to the chaos and confusion,” says Rachel Bitecofer, an election forecaster at the nonpartisan Niskanen Center in Washington. 

Mr. Trump, in effect, is trying to be the Harry Houdini of American politics – seemingly bound by the chains of multiple crises, but clever enough to escape with his political life. One bright spot for the president is that Democratic nominee Joe Biden got little to no “bounce” in the polls out of his convention last week, while Mr. Trump’s job approval has crept up in recent weeks to an average of 44%. 

While Mr. Biden argues that he represents a return to normality and decency, Team Trump counters with Mr. Biden’s long record in Washington – 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president. Mr. Biden’s election, they say, would bring both a deeper “swamp” and a leftist economic program that would send the nation on the path to socialism. 

Presidential historian Gil Troy of McGill University in Montreal questions whether Mr. Trump can pull off a Reaganesque comeback. 

“Ronald Reagan’s second-term election, most famous for its ‘Morning in America’ strategy, had a more positive record to run on, a more positive song to sing,” says Professor Troy. 

Another presidential scholar, David Pietrusza, sees multiple historical analogies for the Trump team to draw upon. 

“Surprisingly, FDR looked very shaky in the summer of 1936,” Mr. Pietrusza writes in an email, referring to President Franklin Roosevelt’s first reelection campaign. “But [Republican nominee Alf] Landon and the GOP ran an awful campaign, and FDR made no great mistakes and coasted to a historic, crushing landslide.”

Harry Truman’s “Give ‘em Hell” campaign in 1948 was a similar case, Mr. Pietrusza says. “At various times, Truman was left for dead, but after a very strong convention and after his challenger picked a running mate from California who added nothing to the ticket, Harry became president in his own right.”

President Reagan had only a one-percentage-point lead in December 1983, but he turned on the charm and touted “Morning in America,” while Democratic nominee Walter Mondale said he would raise taxes, Mr. Pietrusza notes. In November 1984, Mr. Reagan won big.

But Mr. Trump is unique, as are the times in which he is running for a second term. Historical analogies go only so far.

Republican National Committeeman Henry Barbour of Mississippi points to small things that could be telling as November approaches. Mr. Biden stayed in his home state of Delaware for the duration of the Democratic convention last week, which was supposed to be in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but was held mostly virtually. This week, more than 300 Republican party figures gathered in Charlotte, North Carolina, including Mr. Barbour, for a reduced version of their in-person convention. 

Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence spoke from Charlotte on Monday in a show of defiance against the coronavirus that has shut down much of American public life. The president had earlier moved the larger, in-person convention activities to Jacksonville, Florida, after North Carolina’s Democratic governor refused to allow the mega-gatherings that are the essence of national party conventions. 

In July, Mr. Trump canceled the Jacksonville component of the GOP convention after an uptick of coronavirus cases in that city. 

Mr. Barbour says the president and the Republican National Committee wound up modeling what they want the country to do: behave responsibly and avoid large gatherings, but also not allow reasonable daily activity to grind to a halt. 

“I’m proud of what the RNC did,” he says. “That carries over into a much broader contrast and approach: people going to work and doing what they can.”

Hangouts resume on South Bronx stoops as the sun staves off the rain. The grunt of buses fades behind a block of public housing, where a Saturday basketball game is in full swing and a cluster of cops looks on. Nearby a man removes his hat at the sidewalk shrine of a saint.

Alexandra Maruri has walked East 138th Street for decades as a local and a tour guide. But today there are no tours. One out of 4 Bronxites like her are unemployed; she and thousands of others are survivors of COVID-19. In March, her bank account held only $1.77, after she reimbursed 50 customers who had signed up for her walking tours before a ban on travel.

“It was so sudden. I didn’t really have a plan,” she says. 

New York’s saga is a tale of two cities. Yes, Midtown Manhattan is emptier than in the past, but as the Monitor reported last week, many of its mainstay businesses are adapting. Workers in tech and finance are among those who have fared best in terms of job security, nimbly adjusting to remote work. 

By contrast, as the city’s overall jobless rate pushes 20%, workers with the least have lost the most. It’s true on the health front, where the city’s more than 23,600 deaths have fallen heaviest on Latino and Black residents, who account for about half of the city’s population but are dying from COVID-19 at around twice the rate of white New Yorkers. And the economic disruption of city life has generally landed hardest on lower-paid, public-facing jobs such as those in restaurants, retail, and hotels – held by workers who tend to live outside Manhattan in largely nonwhite neighborhoods.

“There’s no question that New Yorkers who were often living paycheck to paycheck are the ones that have sustained the greatest job losses under the pandemic,” says Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future. For example, half of the city’s more than 3 million immigrants lost their main source of income, the think tank estimates.

Meanwhile, New Yorkers like Ms. Maruri are banking on resilience. It helps to have the long view.

Ms. Maruri has seen New York bounce back before. She and her mother arrived from Ecuador in the 1970s “in search of the American dream” as the city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. During the infamous decade of fires that engulfed the South Bronx’s housing, she says her family escaped their own building’s blaze. Three decades later came the recession in 2007, when Ms. Maruri lost her marketing job and had to rebuild again.

Now, as the Bronx Historical Tours founder applies for assistance to keep herself and her small business afloat, she revives her survival skills. She finds peace in parks and eats one meal a day. 

“You either keep going or you cave in,” she says. “I chose to keep going.”

Testing the safety net

Locals who stuck out the outbreak have found varying degrees of struggle and stability in New York City, where, by one pre-pandemic estimate, a family of four needs $10,344 a month to sustain a modest living. 

Previous recessions in the city tended to begin with layoffs in higher-income sectors like finance, followed by a ripple effect in lower-wage industries when consumer spending shrank, says economist James Parrott. 

In the current crisis, job losses are flipped. Although high-wage earners aren’t generally unemployed, they have largely changed the office-lunch and business-travel habits that sustained lower-wage workers. 

“We’re testing the viability of the safety net right now,” says Mr. Parrott, director of economy and fiscal policies at The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs. “We’re beginning an unfortunate experiment when you take away the $600 weekly [federal] supplement.”

New York state on Monday was approved for a federal weekly $300 supplemental check for those unemployed, but when the rollout begins is unclear. 

Experts worry that enduring job losses and shrinking safety nets like the expired $600 federal unemployment benefit may further magnify the city’s inequality.

Ms. Maruri says she spent her $1,200 federal stimulus check on bills, saving only $10 to treat herself to dinner. The additional federal unemployment benefit that expired at the end of July had also gone toward payments that were falling behind.

“It’s a very difficult time without the extra $600,” says Ms. Maruri, who shares an apartment with her mother. That amount was three times what she receives in state unemployment insurance.

Faced with a potential $9 billion deficit within two years, Mayor Bill de Blasio is seeking permission from the state to borrow funds for operating costs. Without more aid, a layoff of 22,000 municipal workers could come next month.

“Scared to come back” 

Ms. Maruri began Bronx Historical Tours in 2011 to help reverse decades of negative press and preconceptions about her home borough. It’s been a tough task.

“I’ve had people bring food with them because they thought we didn’t have restaurants here,” she says.

After applying to numerous financing opportunities while sick with COVID-19, Ms. Maruri won a $6,500 Small Business Administration loan and $2,500 Facebook cash grant this spring. She hopes to revive tours no later than November.

“We’re going to see jobs that involve a lot of social contact like restaurants, hotels, tourism ... be very depressed until we get a vaccine or effective treatment,” says Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist of the Obama administration’s Labor Department and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute.

While the city’s COVID-19 caseload has plummeted (with 1,723 new hospitalizations on April 6 and only 32 on Aug. 6), New Yorkers who are able to resume their jobs still weigh the risks. On her subway and bus commute from Queens to Manhattan to make strangers’ beds, Nudolma Lama Sherpa is afraid to sit down. 

Ms. Lama Sherpa, a room attendant at a midtown hotel, says she stopped getting called to work in mid-March. The federal stimulus check and weekly $600 federal payments were extra boosts for her household, which she shares with her mother and two young adult daughters. Two and a half months passed.

“We got a text from work that they want us to come back,” she says. “But we’re scared to come back.”

Ms. Lama Sherpa says she returned to work for financial security. She reasoned a new gig would be tough to find amid citywide layoffs. 

“Without work, nobody can survive,” says Ms. Lama Sherpa, who recently worked nine days straight.

A dozen blocks downtown, Cindy Jaimangal labors at a hospital. The majority of the city’s million “essential” workers are like her: women and people of color. While her uninterrupted employment lent financial security during the crisis, new stresses were added at work and at home.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Cindy Jaimangal stands outside her home with her children, Julie and Ethan, on Aug. 15, 2020, in the Queens borough of New York. Most mornings, Ms. Jaimangal has a long commute on the subway from Queens to Manhattan, where she works as a patient care associate at an emergency room.

Neighbors

When the doorbell chimes, Ms. Jaimangal’s 4-year-old and 9-year-old retreat to their rooms. “It’s the coronavirus!” they say, even though it’s only Mom. No one can hug her until after she showers. 

The patient care associate spends eight-hour days at a Manhattan emergency room that swelled with COVID-19 patients this spring. A Christian music playlist helps pass the hourlong subway ride back to Queens. Home and exhausted, all she wants is curry chicken and jasmine rice. Unless she falls asleep in a chair. 

Ms. Jaimangal lives with her two children, husband, and parents in the middle-class neighborhood of South Richmond Hills. Since her husband, a software developer, has needed peace and quiet during his remote workday, she will soon resume her second job around dinnertime: homework police.

“I have to prepare mentally,” she says, for the prospect of managing more virtual schooling plus her career this fall.

Ms. Jaimangal became a citizen in 2005, and still sends remittances to family back in Guyana. Despite the outbreak’s grueling work-life balance, she says her household has been financially OK. If anything, they’ve saved, especially with an effort to live frugally. She cut her son’s winter sweatpants down to summer sweatshorts.

“We can manage,” she says.

Despite the demands of her job, Ms. Jaimangal never considered leaving. “I always wanted to help people,” she says. “When the day is over, I want to do something good for somebody. It’s not about pay for me.” 

She ended up helping a friend and neighbor who lives two streets away. When her daughter’s godfather, Dean Ragoonanan, spent 11 days at her hospital with COVID-19, Ms. Jaimangal filled in for family who weren't allowed to visit by tending to him at the start and end of each shift. 

She used to see Mr. Ragoonanan on Sundays as a fellow church member at Bethel Assembly of God. Now Ms. Jaimangal visited him in a hospital bed, praying by his side. He remembers that she even brushed his teeth.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Cindy Jaimangal stands in her backyard where her two children have a trampoline and small pool on Aug. 15, 2020, in Queens.

“I will be forever grateful for Cindy,” says Mr. Ragoonanan. “She never turned her back.”

Now, like so many others, Mr. Ragoonanan has a story that includes both trials and resilience in the face of an uncertain future.

He’s been back home since April. Yet during his recovery he’s had to send his résumé around. His quarter-century career in building maintenance ended this spring. 

He says he misses work. This month he called to tell Ms. Jaimangal that he’d been able to climb up to his roof. He reattached shingles that had scattered in a storm.

Part 1: What will happen to Big Apple’s core? Clues from reopening.

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Typically, Lisa Hermann is a psychology master’s student. But times are far from typical in the town of Lübeck in northern Germany.

With the federal government desperate to keep the coronavirus contained, her university circulated an ad seeking students to help with contact tracing. Having finished her degree half a year early, Ms. Hermann submitted an application. One interview later, she’d signed up for a 39-hour-a-week gig as one of Germany’s newest “containment scouts,” paid €2,325 ($2,749) a month to help with efforts throughout the country.

“It’s similar to the job I want to do in the future, which is help people get through psychologically difficult times,” Ms. Hermann says. “But sometimes the work is very stressful.”

In Ramle, Israel, Liora Valinsky, the director of public health nursing for the Health Ministry, is training a very different set of contact tracers: soldiers. Israel’s traditional contact tracing was underfunded and understaffed, with its efforts initially focused on mass cellphone tracking. After the COVID-19 infection rate spiked over the summer, the government called in the army to lead a new, multipronged effort of testing, tracing, and quarantining.

As case numbers now tick upward in Germany and Israel, the two countries are putting considerable resources behind their contact-tracing efforts in order to contain COVID-19 – albeit in different ways. While Germany has called on civilians and Israel the military for additional reinforcement, it is becoming clear that holding the disease at bay is only as effective as a multifaceted, flexible strategy that includes tracing: identifying who’s infected and who they’ve spent time with, quarantining, and tracking cases.

An early, rigorous start in Germany

In mid-April as cases were spiking, the German government decreed a team of five tracers must be assigned for every 20,000 people. Execution would be left to each of Germany’s 16 states, and extra help from the federal government would be doled out for hard-hit areas.

“One problem was how were we to implement this?” says Dr. Isolde Piechotowski, head of infection protection at the Ministry for Social Affairs and Integration in Baden-Württemberg, Germany’s third-most populous state. They came up with a “flexible personnel planning” strategy.

They began by shifting personnel between government departments, pulling people out of retirement, asking part-timers to ramp up hours, and recruiting new applicants to help contact trace. In all, they’d identified about 2,400 people available if needed, says Dr. Piechotowski.

That preparation has paid off, now that infections are again trending upwards. “The number of people we have had to trace has doubled since the beginning of May,” says Dr. Piechotowski.

Countrywide, the strategy also morphed over time, as more information surfaced about the virus and how it spreads. Tracing teams learned on the fly, with one example being the streamlining of how authorities communicate with infected persons.

“At the beginning, we’d send a written ordinance that they’d need to go into quarantine, says Dr. Jakob Schumacher, deputy public health officer of the Berlin district of Reinickendorf. “Now people get phone calls.” Calmer times were used to train and reorganize.

In April, a points system was implemented to help determine who would get a free test. Those in Category 1, or at highest risk of infection, include people who have had at least 15 minutes of face-to-face contact with an infected person. Lower-risk Category 2 might include someone who sat a couple of rows away from an infected person on an airplane.

“We give points depending on risk factors,” says Dr. Schumacher. “We couldn’t keep up with tracing and testing – this score makes [our efforts] more efficient.”

Health officials in Baden-Württemberg are now also testing asymptomatic people, as well as those outside the typical risk categories in “vulnerable” settings, such as nursing homes. Germany can do this, in part, because of a concerted effort to increase test availability and lab capacity. More testing can reduce tracing workload, says Dr. Piechotowski. “We think that this way we can reduce the numbers.”

Calling in the cavalry in Israel

When the initial outbreak of COVID-19 occurred this spring, Israel managed to quash it with a swift and severe lockdown. But over the summer, new daily cases have rocketed as high as 2,000 – similar to daily counts in Germany, a country with nearly 10 times the population. 

“There was a false sense of assurance that somehow we found the formula to beat the dissemination of the virus,” says Dr. Ran Balicer, director of health policy planning at Clalit, Israel’s largest health care organization.

That’s part of the reason why, at the beginning of April, only 27 nurses nationwide were charged with contact tracing, and then reinforced later that month with 300 more. At that time, Israel had been relying predominantly on an atypical, controversial type of contact tracing while a swift and effective lockdown helped lower infection rates. The government had asked its intelligence service, Israel’s version of the FBI, to deploy mass surveillance capabilities to monitor COVID-19 patients and those who have come in contact with them.

Also used in counterterrorism, the practice has come under fire for being what critics say is dangerous government overreach. It also appears to be wildly inaccurate. According to data provided to the Knesset in July, some 50,000 out of 415,000 Israelis sent into quarantine via the surveillance methods were found to have been contacted in error. It was later determined they hadn’t come into contact with infected individuals after all.

Pleas for additional staffing to help with traditional contact tracing were repeatedly blocked by government bureaucracy, Ms. Valinsky says, as they operated on a “pre-pandemic mindset.” “It’s like we are living in two different worlds,” says Ms. Valinsky. “One is the emergency world of COVID and the other is the bureaucratic system, and the two just don’t meet.”

As pressure to reopen the economy built, a spike in cases soon followed as Israel was transformed into a cautionary tale cited around the world for how not to transition from lockdown.

Now, soldiers have been added for contract tracing. In Ramle, a city in the center of Israel, an army unit that deals with civilians has erected a contact-tracing center. It is part of the central command being established to ensure information is shared between government agencies and public health services.

“The big advantage of the army is that they can do things quickly,” says Ms. Valinsky. Contact tracers are drawn from the army’s pool of university graduates as well as its teachers’ corps, and subsets of the first 300 soldier recruits are already in training.

The Health Ministry has hired nearly 300 medical and nursing students, along with 350 civilians, among them furloughed employees from El-Al, Israel’s airline, for the work. Their hope is to soon have more than 1,000 contact tracers on the task.

Maximizing their strengths

Back in Germany, Ms. Hermann is finding that questions now roll off her tongue, having undergone hours of video, PowerPoint, and online training: Where was contact with the infected person? What was the context? Inside or outside? For how long? Did you drink from the same glass?

Ms. Hermann is pleasantly surprised by how knowledgeable the people are on the other end of the line. “Their information is high quality,” she says, recalling conversations about the impact of air conditioning and the aerosolized method of virus spread.

Ms. Hermann also liaises with airlines – with an additional colleague responsible for holiday returnees – and submits data to the Robert Koch Institute, the federal agency responsible for overseeing coronavirus control. “I’m the one doing statistics, and others write texts very well and communicate with quarantined individuals. Some have kids, so they specialize on school-related issues,” she says. “We’re moving around on the team based on individual strengths.”

In the end, Ms. Hermann is happy she can help fill an urgent societal need. “It’s an exceptional situation.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, we have removed our paywall for all pandemic-related stories.

In late 2018, Evaldo dos Santos told his mother he was stepping out to buy bread for breakfast and would be back in a few minutes. Seven months passed before she saw him again.

Walking through the winding back streets of Rocinha, one of Rio’s largest favelas, Mr. dos Santos was caught up in a shootout between drug traffickers and police. When the smoke cleared, police alleged he was part of the gang.

He spent the next several months in Brazil’s overcrowded prison system waiting for the opportunity to prove his innocence – a story shared by hundreds of thousands of Brazilian inmates languishing in pretrial detention. “They make it so that if you are poor, you are stuck in prison. You don’t have money to pay for a good lawyer? To pay for a good defense? Well then, sorry, but you are going to be behind bars for a while,” says Mr. dos Santos, who was eventually released without charges.

Justice systems around the globe are often accused of providing more leniency to people who are wealthy or white. In the United States, for example, the majority of citizens believe the system treats Black citizens less fairly. But Brazil’s justice system doesn’t informally discriminate: It’s written into law. The criminal code dictates that those with a university education – generally wealthier, lighter-skinned Brazilians – are guaranteed private cells isolated from the general prison population until their trial is complete. This protects them from spending pretrial detention in overcrowded, gang-controlled jails, and can sometimes mean awaiting their trial from home.

Yet, more than half of Brazil’s prison population is eventually released without a conviction. A 2013 study conducted by the Open Society Foundation found that of nearly 8,000 individuals arrested that year in Rio de Janeiro, it took on average more than three months for them to be brought to trial. As COVID-19 ravages Brazil – home to the highest pandemic-related death toll behind only the United States – these inequalities have become even more pronounced in prisons known for overcrowded conditions.

In the wake of COVID-19, Brazil has instituted a near-total shutdown of the country’s state and federal prisons to outsiders – whether lawyers or family members – putting prisoners at a heightened risk of catching the virus as well as reducing their access to a legal defense. The move stands in stark contrast to neighboring nations: In Peru, the government temporarily stopped sending people to prison due to the risks presented by COVID-19. And in Argentina, there was an early push to release more prisoners to carry out their sentences under home surveillance.

C.H. Gardiner

Flavia Pinheiro Froes, a Brazilian lawyer with a reputation for defending some of the country’s most notorious drug traffickers, distributes food in a Rio de Janeiro slum Oct. 16, 2019. Ms. Froes believes the country’s judicial system systemically segregates Brazil’s poor and Black citizens into prisons.

Brazil’s decision to lock down its prisons highlights its disregard for those it puts behind bars, prisoner advocates say. “I’ve had mothers come to me after their sons have been locked up with the wrong name or charged with the same crime twice and say, ‘Look at the absurdity.’ But it’s not absurd. I’ve heard the same story for years,” says Flavia Pinheiro Froes, a Brazilian lawyer fighting what she sees as a systematic effort to segregate the country’s poor and Black citizens into prisons. The coronavirus is exacerbating already serious human rights concerns around the prison system, but, she hopes, this moment could underscore the need for rapid reforms.

Law and justice

Ms. Froes has spent the past several years traveling Brazil visiting its maximum-security prisons where she meets with clients the government says pose such a risk that her only access is through a monitored video feed.

This hasn’t always been her niche. In a country where there is roughly one public defender per 160 prisoners she recalls accepting pastries in exchange for her legal services when she first launched her career in the 1990s. When Ms. Froes was finishing her law degree, she initially wanted to work to put offenders behind bars. She describes her younger self as a law-and-justice conservative and a “Bolsominon,” referencing Brazil’s hard-line President Jair Bolsonaro. But after a professor convinced her to take an internship at the public defender’s office, she says she was shocked to see the conditions in which inmates were living.

“You had people who were never convicted of a crime or were declared innocent but who the prisons wouldn’t release because there was no one to move their file from one office to the other,” she says. In a 2019 report, Human Rights Watch described Brazil’s penitentiaries as overcrowded, rife with violence, and a pipeline for gang recruitment. Brazilian prisons have nearly double the occupancy they were built to contain.

Her willingness to work with any client, regardless of that person’s wealth or stature, led her onto a career path that’s garnered her death threats and government investigations, but also high-paying gigs defending the country’s most notorious drug traffickers. That money, she says, funds her pro bono and criminal justice reform platforms.

Her work defending Brazil’s most infamous criminals underscores what she sees as the very basis of injustice in Brazil: a system that is selectively punitive, taking a “throw-away-the-key” approach for crimes like trafficking, while allowing openly corrupt politicians to carry on with business as usual.

Get out of jail free?

Brazil’s supreme court said in 2015 that the prison system was overwhelmed by “generalized violations of the fundamental rights of prisoners” and that it acts as a segregationist institution punishing those who are uneducated, mentally disabled, and minorities.

“The bottom line is that the people getting arrested are the poor, Black, and uneducated,” says Rio de Janeiro-based public defender Emanuel Queiroz Rangel. He says this imbalance is the “result of a racist society.”

It’s not just a university degree that can get Brazilians better prison conditions. The law extends to a handful of professions involved in Brazil’s legal infrastructure, including lawyers, police, judges, and anyone who has served on a jury. It also applies to politicians, ambassadors, union leaders, teachers, and anyone who is a part of the Livro do Mérito, a Brazilian professional honor society that can be joined by donation and which is regulated by the presidency.

A 2009 attempt to quash this form of special detention passed Brazil’s Senate, but Congress vetoed the bill and it has since been tabled, overshadowed by nearly a decade of political scandals implicating presidents, congressmen, and the business community. At least a third of the 2009 Congress has benefited from the law in some form following a laundry list of corruption and graft charges, many stemming from the world-famous Car Wash scandal.

The role that political influence plays in providing judicial leniency has become a point of contention in recent months.

Take Fabricio Queiroz, the former parliamentary aid to Flávio Bolsonaro, the president’s son. He was arrested June 16, accused of being the middle man in a corruption scheme implicating the younger Bolsonaro. Less than a month later, courts granted him rare leniency to spend his pre-crime detention at home on account of belonging to a group at high risk of contracting the coronavirus. On July 23, a team of human rights lawyers asked Minister João Otávio de Noronha, who released Mr. Queiroz, for similar leniency for other high-risk inmates. The appeal was denied.

Marcos Fuchs, associate director of Brazilian human rights nongovernmental organization Conectas, says the fact that Mr. Queiroz was granted leniency in itself isn’t wrong. But affording lawyers and finding doctors willing to appeal in one’s favor is an impossible outcome for the vast majority of people.

“From the moment you have your own lawyer, he will be able to apply for a habeas corpus. He will be able to push for the case to be taken to a higher court. Eventually the lawyer will find a way to get his client out,” Mr. Fuchs says.

Since March, Mr. Fuchs has submitted 520 pro bono compassionate release petitions to the courts. About 20 have been successful. The courts have denied over 84% of compassionate release petitions throughout the country over the past three months, with some states like Rio de Janeiro refusing nearly every request.

Editor’s note: As a public service, we have removed our paywall for all pandemic-related stories.

Reuters

Julia Jackson, mother of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot by a police officer, speaks at a press conference in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Aug. 25.

History is often shaped by singular events, the kind that touch human thought and then move both empires and concrete. The fall of the Soviet empire, for example, was sparked in 1989 by a modest relaxing of travel restrictions in East Germany. A mental wall was breached and, with it, the Berlin Wall.

This week in two different countries, New Zealand and the United States, similar events happened to amplify a yearning in Western societies to change the models of justice from a focus on punishment toward one that brings individual and social healing.

For the first time in its history, New Zealand handed down its most severe criminal sentence Thursday – life in prison without the possibility of parole – to Brenton Harrison Tarrant. In March 2019, the white supremacist attacked two mosques, killing 51 worshippers. During his sentencing, 91 survivors and relatives of victims addressed him directly – by turns angry, sorrowful, pitying, and empathetic. Many of their comments reflected a desire for something beyond the salve of seeing him locked away for life. As Janna Ezat, whose son was slain in the attacks, told the gunman, “I have only one choice: to forgive you.”

At nearly the same moment in the U.S., professional athletes put down their basketballs, baseballs, and tennis balls in protest over the Aug. 23 police shooting of Jacob Blake. Mr. Blake, a Black man, was shot seven times by a white officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, under circumstances still under investigation. Like Ms. Ezat, Julia Jackson, Mr. Blake’s mother, reached for something higher than mere retribution: “God did not make one type of tree, or flower, or fish, or horse, or grass, or rock. Please let’s begin to pray for healing our nation.”

Such thoughts often get overlooked in the media’s fixation on justice as solely punishment. One alternative, known as restorative justice, is based on opening a dialogue between wrongdoers and those they have harmed, with the hope of moral elevation and perhaps reconciliation. Through apology, forgiveness, and inward reform, its purpose is to restore the wholeness of wounded individuals and communities. The use of restorative justice is now a common tool from juvenile courts to bankruptcy proceedings. It has been vital for healing in entire countries after violent conflict, such as in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and South Africa.

It is also providing a framework for ongoing attempts to reconcile former colonies and their colonizers. Germany and Namibia, for example, are negotiating ways to redress gross violations of human rights during the colonial era. It may be the recipe for ultimately resolving the debate over reparations for slavery.

As difficult as restorative justice may be, its reasons are clear. “We must break the spiral of reprisal and counter-reprisal,” South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu observed in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “Confession, forgiveness and reconciliation in the lives of nations are not just airy-fairy religious and spiritual things, nebulous and unrealistic. They are the stuff of practical politics.”

In the months since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many Black Americans have believed nothing would change in American society, especially police departments. That skepticism endures. Yet a key idea is taking root. Polly Sheppard, who survived the attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, has expressed it this way: “There is no healing with hatred. You have to love each other.” 

A door was opened this week in both the U.S. and New Zealand to rebalance the purpose of justice. As the South African commission noted, “Reconciliation is not an event.” Yet acts of forgiveness, as agents of justice, rest on an acknowledgment that love is more true to human nature than revenge – and more resilient. It takes down walls.