Pot Prisoners: Meet Five Victims of the War on Drugs
In the summer of 1986, Eric Sterling, a young Congressional staffer serving on the House Subcommittee on Crime, was told to come up with a plan to toughen up America’s drug laws. “The issue of drugs and crime was really being hyped by the Reagan administration and the news media,” says Sterling. “They were all looking at this, saying, ‘We need to crack down.'”
The “tough-on-crime” frenzy that ensued would transform America. In their rush to do something about drugs, lawmakers reshaped the U.S. criminal justice system, cementing harsh mandatory minimum sentences. But as Sterling remembers it, back in 1986, most lawmakers were uninformed about what they were doing and unaware of the impact it would have on thousands of lives.
When Ronald Reagan signed the The Anti-Drug Abuse Act that October, he promised nothing short of a “drug-free generation.” At the signing, Reagan told the audience of athletes and schoolchildren that addicts would get the support they needed to “live right” and that America’s jails would not fill up with drug users. Yet mandatory minimums trigger an automatic enhanced sentence based on relatively arbitrary amounts of drugs. They rob judges of discretion; while empowering prosecutors to threaten decades-long sentences, even life without parole. In short, America’s jails filled up – and quick.
“The Anti-Drug Abuse Act was an emotional reaction and not a rational one, so it’s not surprising that its effects have not been what supporters claimed,” says Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “It was done to reduce crime and drug use, but drug use is the same today. In fact, drugs are even cheaper, easier to get. So it’s done nothing in that regard.” In 1994, Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which introduced the three-strikes rule, mandating life without parole for three or more convictions for federal violent felonies or drug trafficking. Many states followed suit, passing three-strikes and habitual offender laws.
Under those conditions, there’s not much mystery why, despite Reagan’s promise to the contrary, America is now the number-one jailer in the world. In 2015, there were an estimated 2,173,800 Americans in local jails, state and federal prisons, according to the Bureau of Justice. And even though pot is now legal at the state level in many parts of the country, roughly one in eight federal prisoners are serving time for marijuana offenses.
Unlike a majority of Americans, who think marijuana should be legal, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has repeatedly broadcast his antipathy to legalization. He’s also opposed to broader reforms that would help rectify the criminal justice excesses of the past few decades.
In the past year, he’s cited the current opioid epidemic as a reason to scale back the legalization of pot.
But Eric Sterling, who’s seen first-hand how a drug panic can lead to knee-jerk policy with unpredictably cruel outcomes, thinks there’s a better way to address addiction. “Our goal should be to save the lives of drug users,” he says. “It’s not about putting more people in prison.”
Mark Osler, whose time as a prosecutor in 1990s Detroit turned him into a criminal justice reformer, says he’s sensed discomfort with Sessions’ approach, even among some Republicans in Washington. “It’s going back to 1982,” he says. And by now we should know that putting people in prison for selling drugs does not end drug use.
“People still get pot!” Osler says. “Any of those marijuana lifers, whoever they were supplying, the next week those people were getting pot from somewhere else. That’s what makes it really sad.”
In 2017, some Americans can walk into a local dispensary and buy marijuana – or even grow it in their own home – without fear of consequences. Millionaire hedge funders have gotten into the legal weed game. Yet other Americans are still in prison for decades for growing or selling the same, or far smaller, amounts of pot.
In the U.S. criminal justice system, people still get locked up for pot even as others profit from it; it’s not an easy contradiction to justify.
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Fate Vincent Winslow
Conviction: Distribution of marijuana
Sentence: Life imprisonment without parole, probation or suspension of sentence
Facility: Louisiana State Penitentiary at AngolaOne night in 2008, an undercover cop from the Shreveport, Louisiana police department came up to Fate Winslow, a 41-year-old homeless man, and wanted to know if he could get him “a girl.” Winslow asked if he wanted anything else, and the officer said he’d like two dime bags of weed, worth $10 each. The cop agreed to pay $25, with $5 to compensate Winslow. (“A girl” was never procured.)
Winslow says he’d been trying to get his life together, but couldn’t afford to turn down the money. “I wasn’t lookin to sell drugs. But when you homeless, every dollar counts [sic],” he writes from prison.
The dealer, who was white, wasn’t taken in – even though officers found the marked $20 bill on him. Winslow was arrested, put on trial and convicted of selling marijuana. He had three priors: A burglary when he was 17, another burglary when he was 27 (he wasn’t armed during either one) and cocaine possession at 37, so he was deemed a habitual offender.
Thanks to Louisiana’s four-strikes law, his sentence was bumped to mandatory life without parole. For playing middle-man in a tiny weed deal, Louisiana is denying him the chance to even appear before a parole board – not now that he’s 50 years old, and not if he lives until he’s 100, no matter what he does to show that he’s reformed.
“This is the world we live in,” Winslow writes. “The dealer sold the weed and gave me 5 dollars… now I got life.”
Winslow’s home for life, more commonly known as Angola, is the biggest prison in America. It’s notorious for violence, overcrowding and hosting the only remaining prison rodeo in the country, billed as “The Wildest Show in the South.”
“This is a place no one wants to be,” Winslow writes. “There was forty people in a dorm now there’s eighty-six. They put bed on top of bed but they did not add one more toilet or one more shower,” he writes. “Thanks god I am living that is ALL I can say.”
At his trial, Winslow’s life sentence was determined swiftly. After only an hour of deliberation, 10 white jurors voted guilty, while the two black jurors voted not guilty. Years later, when the Daily Beast contacted the prosecutor who’d sought the maximum sentence, he said the case didn’t “ring a bell.” A white juror who’d voted guilty also couldn’t recall much about Winslow, but told the reporter that over the years, she’d been bothered by the fact that the amount of pot was “ridiculously small.”
“Justice in Shreveport,” Winslow writes.
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Michael Alonzo Thompson
Conviction: Possession with intent to deliver marijuana, conspiracy to possess with intent to deliver marijuana, delivery of marijuana, possession of a weapon by a convicted felon, possession of a weapon during the commission of a felony
Sentence: 40 to 60 years
Facility: Muskegon Correctional Facility in MichiganIn 1994, Michael Alonzo Thompson, A.K.A. “Meeko,” sold three pounds of pot to the manager of a car muffler shop in Flint, Michigan. He knew the man from going there to get his car fixed. What he didn’t know was that he’d had been pressured to take part in a sting by the Flint Area Narcotics Group (FANG). Thompson got busted and police searched his house, where they found three guns, two of which were antiques and another gun that belonged to his wife. Even though he hadn’t been armed at the time of the sale, prosecutors slapped him with a long list of charges including possession of a firearm while committing a felony – a pretty big stretch, since he didn’t have a gun on him when he allegedly sold the weed. Because he had priors – including three cocaine convictions dating back to 1982 – Thompson was deemed a habitual offender and sentenced to 40 to 60 years in prison. Now 66, he’s spent two decades behind bars.
He admits that he made mistakes – three pounds is not a small amount of pot. But he also believes that he’s more than repaid his debt to society. “I’ve been in prison for 22 years for a nonviolent crime,” Thompson says from prison. “Meanwhile, I see all these guys getting out for murders. Real brutal murders.”
Claudia Perkins-Milton, a United Auto Workers union rep who first met Thompson on the Flint assembly-line, agrees that he doesn’t belong in prison. After all, there are people legally selling a lot more pot than he was ever charged with. “I mean, come on,” she says. “Cannabis is legal in a lot of places recreationally now.” Perkins-Milton, a Flint activist and the first Flint African-American woman to hold the highest position as a UAW rep, thinks he’d be far more useful to the community on the outside.
As a free man, Thompson had worked as a music promoter with acts like Aretha Franklin and Patty LaBelle. He has an award from the NAACP, and a Flint key to the city, for helping forge a truce between street gangs in the 1980s. On Unity Day in 1984, Thompson and hundreds of young people marched to the Flint waterfront to demand jobs and opportunities beyond gang life.
“He did a lot of good for the city,” Perkins-Milton says. “What he did was stupid and it cost him, but he also did a lot of good.” Perkins-Milton says Thompson and his family, who operated a car wash and arcade, worked hard to give unemployed young people jobs.
Thompson’s nephew Sheldon Neeley, a Democratic Congressman in the Michigan House, is also working to get him out. He was with Thompson’s mom before she died and she had a final wish for her grand-nephew. “One of the last things she said was that she didn’t want him to expire in prison,” Neeley says over the phone from Flint. “One of the commitments I made to her was that I’d do everything in my power to make sure he would not.”
Neeley, who calls his uncle’s long sentence “egregious,” says it shows how badly America needs criminal justice reform. “Those deemed the underclass who’ve been forgotten in our criminal justice system – justice has not been fair for them.”
Obviously, Thompson agrees. “Why do you have me in here, sitting idle and wasting the taxpayer money?” he says. “I made some mistakes that should have never happened. I can’t stress how much I regret it. But I feel I can offer society way more than what I’m doing now, all this idle time in prison.”
“When you have a certain amount of pride for yourself and you do something stupid, you deal with your own embarrassment,” says Thompson. “But I don’t deserve 40 to 60 years. I’m not that kind of person. I don’t deserve that.”
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Crystal Munoz
Conviction: Conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute 1000 kilograms of marijuana.
Sentence: 18 years
Facility: FMC Carswell, a federal facility in Ft. Worth, TexasCrystal Munoz, a 38-year-old Navajo mother of two young girls, was sentenced to almost two decades for drawing a map of a road in Big Bend National Park on a piece of notebook paper – a favor, she says, for some friends. These friends would end up using that map to circumvent a drug checkpoint in a large marijuana trafficking operation. Later, they testified against her hoping for more lenient sentences. It’s not clear if they succeeded, but Munoz is nine years into an 18 year sentence for conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute 1,000 kilograms or more of marijuana.
That’s a lot of pot. But she maintains that any role she might have played in the operation was minimal. “The map was on a peice of notebook paper and with arrows/lines for the road. It was not very sophisiticated [sic],” she writes from Carswell, a minimum-security women’s prison.
Despite her allegedly small role, she faced a very long sentence. That’s because when a person is charged with conspiracy, all the government has to do to hook a defendant for all the drugs sold is to have witnesses testify against them. They don’t ever have to have been caught with drugs.
“That’s where you get the ‘drugless’ drug cases,’ where there’s no drugs in evidence,” Eric Sterling, the former congressional staffer who helped draft mandatory minimums back in the 1980s, says. In theory, this is meant to take down kingpins, who are less likely to get caught with drugs on them than lower-level dealers. But the higher up someone is in an operation, the more information they can trade for reduced sentences. Meanwhile, mid-level people might not be too eager to testify against the real ringleader, especially if they’re violent. “I wouldn’t want to identify the kingpin because what if he finds out I ratted him out and kills my family?,’ says Sterling. “So I make up a story, or help the government entrap someone.”
At first Munoz had considered pleading guilty, which would have triggered a 10-year mandatory minimum. But her lawyer cautioned that she could also get 30-to-life, and if she pled guilty she’d lose her right to appeal. So she took her chances at trial, and lost.
Pregnant during her trial, she delivered her daughter as a federal prisoner. “I remember the day I gave birth to her,” she writes. “I knew I would have to leave when my hospital stay was up. I did not sleep, I stayed up the whole time holding her … She was abandoned by her momma, but not by my will. One day I was just gone.”
When Crystal was brought back to the holding facility she cried and screamed until an officer demanded she calm down. “I cried quietly after that moment. I stayed crying for days in my cell.”
As Broadly reported in January, Munoz was one of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders hoping to have their sentences commuted before President Obama left office as part of his clemency initiative – her husband Ricky thought the former president might be sympathetic because he has two daughters of his own.
Although Obama granted 1,715 commutations, most for nonviolent drug offenders, Munoz wasn’t one of them.
For a while, Ricky was too scared to tell the kids that Crystal had been denied. “When they found out they were just in shock. They really believed she would get out,” he says. “They were so excited.”
Crystal can’t fathom why people get put in prison for nonviolent crimes.
“Hundreds of people I have encountered over the years, beautiful people, who made a mistake, some who have been imprisoned for 2 decades and will die imprisoned, for their part in a drug conspiracy,” she says. “It’s hard, and I try to make sense of it all, but there came a point when I just stopped trying to understand. You can’t.”
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Andy Cox
Conviction: conspiracy to manufacture and attempt to manufacture marijuana in and around the Chattahoochee National Forest
Sentence: Life without parole
Prison: United States Penitentiary, a federal facility in Pollock, LouisianaIt started with an irate neighbor, who called the National Forest Service to complain about the deep tracks of an all-terrain vehicle crossing their land and running into Cattahoochee National Forest in Georgia. The caller also told agents they’d seen “strange plants.” NFS agents who went to investigate found dead and dying plants on forest land. Hiking further up to Cox’s dad’s house, they found more plants in trays.
In the spring of 2004, 41-year-old Andy Cox and three other men had planted cannabis seedlings in the forest and on the property of Cox’s father, Harry Cox. Andy, a former firefighter and small business owner, says the plan was to “grow some really good buds” and “to sell and smoke the weed after harvesting.” (Cox also contends that another man actually ran the operation).
Because the operation involved more than one person, Cox and the other men were indicted in a conspiracy to manufacture and attempt to manufacture marijuana. When he realized he might have to go to prison for five to 10 years, he ran away instead of facing the charges. While in hiding, he realized that the sentence awaiting him if he were ever caught was life without parole.
He lived underground for three years. “It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life,” he writes from Pollock, Louisiana. “Being a fugitive is very lonely. The Holidays were the worst… I never contacted any of my family. I missed my children so, so much.” Captured in 2008, he decided to take his case to trial. It was a risky move – defendants who exercise their right to trial are far more likely to get long sentences – and it ended in disaster.
Cox was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in 2009, the same year Barack Obama – who’d freely admitted to smoking marijuana – started his presidency. Even though it was a nonviolent crime, U.S. Attorney David E. Nahmias boasted about locking him up for life. “He will have no more chances to poison our communities with illegal drugs, and his sentence should send a message that our national forests are not a safe haven for crime,” Nahmias declared in an official press release.
Almost a decade later, as legal pot has swept the country, it’s even harder for Cox to make sense of his life sentence. “It is crazy that in eight states they are growing so much more marijuana that I have ever been accused of,” Cox says. He’d hoped to get clemency from President Obama, but his petition was denied. “There was no violence or victims in my case, except for my family,” Cox says. “I have let them down, and that is not me.” Cox has three kids – the youngest, who was five when he left, just graduated high school.
Cox is still working on overturning his sentence, but also accepts the harsh reality. “I do see where I could very well die in prison,” he writes.
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Patricia Albright
Conviction: Conspiracy to manufacture marijuana, manufacturing marijuana, and structuring currency transactions to evade federal reporting requirements
Sentence: Five and a half years
Facility: Federal Correctional Institution Dublin in CaliforniaPatricia Albright learned how to use pot as medicine under the worst imaginable circumstances: her son, Trevor, then age 8, was dying of cancer. By that point, he’d lost both eyes to the retinoblastoma he’d been diagnosed with at 16 months old.
“He did well with it at first but as time went on he became listless and barely conscious and when he was, the pain was so severe he would be screaming for help,” Patricia writes from prison. “If we gave him more morphine we would have killed him.” Then, his oncologist suggested medical marijuana – teaching Patricia how to make butters and tinctures – and it appeared to help ease his pain.
“It was so wonderful to see him laugh, eat his favorite foods, listen to music, ‘watch’ Mr. Rogers (his favorite) … enjoy visitors and ultimately have the chance to read to his new baby sister in braille,” she writes. She gave birth to his sister 17 days before he passed away in 1984. On the morning of his death, she remembers, Patricia gave him permission to die. “I told him that time in Heaven was different than time on earth and that his mommy would be right behind him.”
After her son’s death, she continued to make marijuana products for people suffering from a host of painful conditions. “I gave away medicine to AIDS, cancer, heart, dialysis, MS, cerebral palsy and epileptic patients,” she says. She herself had a prescription for medical marijuana she used to treat the anxiety and PTSD she experienced after the trauma of taking care of her dying child, and she and her son Jordan ran a medical pot collective with eight other people. California legalized medical marijuana in 1996. In keeping with the guidelines for legal growers, Albright and all the other growers had physician-issued prescriptions.
In September of 2010, the collective got a visit from a man they suspected to be a cop. They told him to get off their property. As it turned out, he was an undercover agent from the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office. Later that month, a task force made up of local, state and federal officials executed a search warrant on the property.
Albright and her son Jordan were indicted for pot sold between 2008 and 2010, in addition to gun charges for the shotgun she says she kept to ward off mountain lions and bears.
Offered a plea deal of four years in prison for her, and one year of home supervision for her son, Albright refused, claiming that she’d done nothing wrong or illegal. But that didn’t matter in federal court. “I have learned since my indictment that a medical marijuana defense is not allowed in most federal courts,” she wrote in 2013. “Neither is the fact that we were totally legal and compliant with state and county laws.”
At the time, she asked the Obama administration for help. “I believe in you … we are not criminals,” she wrote in a letter. Faced with 20 years and prison time for her son, she took a guilty plea and got five and a half years. Her son got prison time as well. “I was pretty pissed off when Jordan and I were sent to prison. We took such great care to make sure we met the criteria for a completely State of California and El Dorado County legal collective, she says. “Apparently that does not matter to the feds.”
Federally, pot is still a Schedule I drug, which means it’s not actually legal anywhere in the U.S., giving the federal government the authority to raid marijuana facilities, even in places that have legalized at the state level. Amy Povah, the head of CAN-DO for clemency says her case is a perfect example countering Sessions’ Department of Justice line on pot.
“Patricia’s case establishes that the public cannot trust the current propaganda coming from Jeff Sessions’ Dept of Justice that claims ‘all drug cases are inherently violent’ and that there are ‘no low level’ drug offenders in federal prison.” Povah says.
Albright believes she was targeted so the government could seize her property through asset forfeiture. “The feds filed forfeiture on my home and land 10+ acres in the woods above Nevada County where I raised my two children without any child support and fought like hell to keep and maintain.’ In July, Attorney General Sessions said he would expand civic asset forfeiture.
Patricia doesn’t think she should be in prison, given the high cost to taxpayers.
“The U.S. makes up 5% of the world population but we have 25% of the prisoners. Shame on them,” she writes. “Seriously screwed up when you think of what politicians that get away with.”