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When Stephen Baker showed up at a federal prison in central Louisiana, even the staff couldn’t believe he was there.
The United States Penitentiary in Pollock typically holds more hardened criminals, not someone serving a sentence for conspiracy to distribute marijuana. The staff even had to double-check that he was in the right place.
“Everybody laughed at me. ‘You’re really in here for marijuana, man?’” Baker remembers them saying. “They couldn’t believe it.”
Baker, who lived in Maumelle prior to his arrest, was sentenced to 150 months in 2017 after pleading guilty in federal court to conspiracy to distribute marijuana. He was released earlier this year and is staying at a halfway house in Little Rock. He hopes to get an apartment soon where he can live on his own, maybe even with his son who is still in school.
Baker’s life inside and outside the prison has been aided by a grant program from Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit that helps people convicted of nonviolent cannabis offenses.
The organization offers several grants that help people in Baker’s shoes. One puts money in prisoners’ commissary accounts. Baker said he received $300 four times a year, allowing him to make phone calls and send some money home. Last Prisoner Project also helped him send gifts at Christmas.
Now, Baker is on the outside, benefiting from another of Last Prisoner Project’s grants. This one helps former prisoners in the process of reentering society. The $5,000 Baker received helped him put a downpayment on a car and pay rent on an apartment.
Baker said clothes are important too and he needed just about everything when he got out. Socks, underwear, shoes, pants, you name it. Even a toothbrush and toothpaste.
“You don’t realize all the stuff you really have to get when you are gone for so long and you lose everything,” he said. “Just a few outfits is a big deal.”
Baker’s life crumbled while he was incarcerated. He was separated from his kids, whose custody bounced around in his absence. His cars were sold to keep things afloat financially. His house burned down. His wife left him.
“I didn’t blame her. I didn’t want her to stay around really. She had to move on with her life,” he said.
A changing world
Baker’s incarceration is part of the United States’ complicated cannabis landscape in which marijuana is legal for medicinal or recreational purposes on a state-by-state basis. Since California legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes in 1996, 38 states have legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes and 23 states have legalized it for recreational purposes. Some states have done both. Despite the increasing legality of marijuana across the states, thousands of people are still arrested for marijuana crimes at the local, state and federal levels.
It’s a conflict that Stephanie Shepard knows well. Today, Shepard is the director of advocacy for Last Prisoner Project. But in 2010 when she lived in New York, she was charged with conspiracy to distribute marijuana, then sentenced to 10 years in prison. When she was released after nine years, she saw the world’s attitude toward cannabis had changed.
Shepard described how she was sitting in a federal prison for a cannabis crime one day and, the next day, she was looking at dispensaries, billboards and advertisements for cannabis delivery.
“We find that a little unfair, to say the least,” she said.
Upon release, Shepard lived in a halfway house and worked at Starbucks in California. She cried in her job interview as she explained to an outsider for the first time why she was wearing an ankle monitor. Around that time, she also attended a Last Prisoner Project fundraiser (with permission from her probation officer) and found a group of people with a similar focus.
“I just found a group of people who cared about people like me,” she said.
Today, Shepard and Last Prisoner Project are pushing for President Joe Biden to grant clemency to the people still in federal prison for cannabis crimes. The organization’s website has a countdown clock for the rest of Biden’s term in hopes that he will “keep his promise” and free more than 3,000 people.
Founded in 2019, Last Prisoner Project has given out more than $3 million to its grantees, sent letters to inmates and worked directly with prisoners’ families. Shepard said the services are all things that would have benefited her during her incarceration.
She said she’s not bitter about her time in prison, and noted others have gotten much longer sentences. But she’s steadfast in her belief about the unfairness of it all.
“It’s no longer a crime if I can have it delivered to my front door,” she said.
Baker felt the unfairness when he was in prison too, noting everything he had lost with his family and children while incarcerated.
“You’re in there losing it and everybody else is out in the community making millions of dollars, getting patted on the back, getting awards,” he said.
Graduation day
Baker’s story isn’t all sad. He set a goal for himself to get out of prison in time to see his youngest daughter graduate from Maumelle High School. He attended a residential drug treatment program to reduce his sentence so he could make his deadline and he said everyone in prison knew that was his plan after having missed some of his other kids’ graduations.
“At that time, that was my only goal, to get out and see my daughter graduate,” he said. His daughter had been named her school’s homecoming queen a few months before, but he hadn’t been there to see it.
Baker made it to graduation, though, with only about three days to spare, he said.
Today, Baker is working a job that helps him get by, but he’s hoping for something better. He knows he doesn’t want to go back to criminality. He said he learned his lesson, unlike some other inmates he saw get released and then return to prison. Baker plans to work at least two jobs when he gets out of the halfway house to get his life back on track.
“I’ve got to play catchup and I don’t want to go back to anything like what I was doing, because I missed out on everything in my kids’ lives. I can’t miss out on any more time,” he said.
“}]] Stephen Baker of Maumelle served nine years in federal prison on a nonviolent cannabis conviction. Last Prisoner Project is helping him get his life back together. Read More
