"Trump is going to try dampening black voter enthusiasm for Biden by contrasting the two men’s criminal justice records."

"The framing will be simple: Trump signed a bipartisan criminal-legal reform bill, the First Step Act, and has been generous with his pardon powers toward unjustly imprisoned black people, like Alice Marie Johnson.... ...Trump’s status as a self-styled reformer is laughable, [but] Biden’s record is grotesque. Most of its lowlights occurred in the 'tough on crime' 1980s and 1990s... [when] he viciously characterized people who commit crimes as sociopathic 'predators' who are beyond rehabilitation. He cast then-President Bush’s escalation of the War on Drugs as lacking 'enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.' He authored the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act [that]... expanded the death penalty, eliminated education funding for imprisoned students, created harsher sentencing guidelines for a wide range of crimes, and increased funding for local police departments and corrections departments....  Perhaps more than any other official of the era, he embodied the Democratic impulse to outflank Republicans from the right by locking more people in jails and prisons. He helped catalyze the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. He said he was 'not at all' ashamed of his involvement as recently as 2016...."

From "On Criminal Justice, Biden Has No Moral Standing Over Trump" by Zak Cheney-Rice (New York Magazine).

... the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country... — I don't think I'd ever seen the word "carceral" before — "the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country." But it's a word that the OED traces back to the 1500s. It means what you can easily see it means — relating to prisons. Nabokov used it in "Invitation to a Beheading" (1960), describing the opening of a prison door: "... suddenly the key scraped in the lock and the door opened, whining, rattling and groaning in keeping with all the rules of carceral counterpoint." That is, opening the prison door sounded exactly like opening a prison door.

ADDED: This magazine essay is larded with assurances that Trump is awful on criminal justice too, so it's only that Biden will have trouble gaining an advantage here. Biden can't get "moral standing over Trump," but why doesn't Trump have moral standing over Biden?