Waiting to Die in Prison—for Selling a Couple of Bags of Pot

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/life-sentence-marijuana-pot-prison-commuted

Even as more Americans toke up legally, many are still rotting behind bars for marijuana offenses.
—By Bryan Schatz | July/August 2015 Issue

Editor's note: In the next few weeks, President Obama is expected to commute the sentences of dozens of federal inmates behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses, according to the New York Times.

It's just after 9 p.m. near the corner of Fourth and Marshall, a poor part of Shreveport, Louisiana. A homeless man approaches a guy on the street and asks him what he's looking for. That guy, an undercover cop, says he wants "two dimes" and promises a $5 commission. And Fate Vincent Winslow, knowing that $5 buys a meal, if not a great one, agrees. Minutes after he returns carrying two crumpled bags of marijuana, worth $10 each, he's in the backseat of a squad car. Three months later, Winslow is found guilty of selling a Schedule I Controlled Dangerous Substance. Another three months and the sentence lands: life imprisonment at hard labor with no chance for parole.

Winslow's punishment—to die behind bars, for a transaction involving a minuscule quantity of pot—is hard to believe. But it's not unique. Every year, more people are arrested for pot possession than violent crimes. Around 40,000 people are currently serving time for offenses involving a drug that has been decriminalized or legalized in 27 states and Washington, DC. Even as Americans' attitudes toward pot have mellowed, the law has yet to catch up, leaving pot offenders subject to draconian sentences born out of the war on drugs. As David Holland, a criminal-defense attorney in New York City who filed a presidential clemency petition for marijuana lifers in 2012, puts it: "The world has changed, but these poor bastards are still sitting in jail."

Writing from the notorious maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Winslow told me how he'd come to face "the great injustice that is upon me." As a kid, he dropped out of high school and landed on the streets, "hanging with the wrong crowd." At 17 he was convicted of simple burglary; he later got eight and a half years for rifling through an unlocked car. A decade later, he was caught with some coke. "I always had a job," he writes—working in chicken plants, building houses. Yet his encounter with the undercover cop in 2008 branded him a habitual offender under Louisiana law, triggering an automatic life sentence. "Life for two bags of weed," he writes. "People kill people and get five years."

How many prisoners are serving life sentences for pot? At least 69, based on data collected by the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations. But that figure probably is low, particularly if you count older inmates serving lengthy sentences who will likely die in prison. Federal judges have sentenced 54 people to life without parole for marijuana crimes since 1996, according to the Clemency Report. Solid numbers are hard to find. "Incarceration data for cannabis-only-related offenses is the holy grail of criminal-justice data for cannabis law reformers," says Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, who has filed dozens of requests for this information. "All the time it seems like I learn of another one that I'd never heard of before," says Cheri Sicard, vice president of the CAN-DO Foundation, an advocacy group for nonviolent drug offenders.

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