25 Years in Prison for a First-time, Nonviolent Offense

In 1991 I got busted by the feds for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense: selling LSD at 15 colleges in five states. I was a kid, barely out of my teens, and was determined to be a great American anti-hero. Facing 20 years to life, due to mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws, I took off shortly before my December 1991 sentencing and became a Top 15 fugitive on the US Marshals most wanted list until my capture in October 1993. Not a smart move, but one I deemed necessary at the time. When I was caught the government threw the book at me.

Mandatory minimums would keep me incarcerated for the next two decades.

Passed by Congress as part of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, the federal sentencing guidelines wiped out parole in the federal system and stipulated that offenders do 85% of their time. These laws are the reason incarceration rates have skyrocketed over the past 25 years. The lock them up and throw way the key mentality has prevailed. But as the hysteria of that era has abated, calmer heads in Congress have come up with a plan to reduce mandatory minimum sentences in the form of several bills that could see passage this session.

When I was sentenced in the US Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in 1993, it would have been nice if federal judges had this type of power, but as the Honorable Claude Hilton said when he sentenced me to 292 months for my misadventures in the drug game, “My hands are tied.”

So even if he wanted to go below the mandatory minimum 20-year sentence I faced for running a Continuing Criminal Enterprise, he couldn’t. The statues didn’t allow it. He had to adhere to the guidelines Congress had passed into law to combat all the wannabe Scarfaces and aspiring Jeff Spicoli’s like myself.

If I had been sentenced a few years earlier I would have only gotten ten years and been eligible for parole after doing a third of my time. But with the new sentencing policies I was hit. When I came into the system looking like a fresh faced college kid and told other prisoners I was doing a 25 years sentence they were shocked. “How many people did you kill?” They asked. But the answer was that I was a first-time, nonviolent offender who got cracked in the head with more time than how old I was.

But now over two decades later, things are beginning to change. It’s too late for me, as I already served my time Shawshank Redemption-style, but with the introduction and passing of these sentencing reform bills, a lot of people will be spared the punishment that was imposed on me for my youthful transgressions and rightly so.

“You did too much time,” a convict we’ll call Hank says. Hank is serving 11 years on a gun charge and is a two time felon so he knows the new laws won’t alter his sentence. But I was around him early in my bid. He got out and came back when I was about to go home. “You did a stretch kid.” He tells me over the phone from prison. “If you got busted in the 80s you would have never did that time. The same if you got busted now. But you got busted at the wrong time.” Wrong person, wrong place, wrong time- the story of my life.

“How can you not say sentencing reform is necessary?” Julie Stewart from Families Against Mandatory Minimum asks. She and FAMM started advocating for sentencing reforms shortly before I went to prison in 1993. As locking up nonviolent drug offenders like myself became the norm, Stewart made a career of battling against the draconian sentences we served. FAMM’s motto has long been, “Let the Punishment fit the Crime” and Stewart has been its strongest advocate.

“We have 214,000 people in prison and that is only talking federal prison,” Stewart says. “Over half of them, 51 percent, are drug offenders. So what are we doing? Why are we incarcerating people for decades, literally, for crimes that are in many cases not even considered by the public to be a big deal anymore? At the time when these laws were passed it was one thing, now we are at the point where the public is overwhelmingly supporting sentencing reform. It just doesn’t make any sense for the kind of laws that have been on the books for so long to continue to be there.”

The other bill in Congress is The Smarter Sentencing Act, and as Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at The Ohio State University explains, support is strong.

“The Smarter Sentencing Act appears to have an especially prominent new advocate in Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX),” Berman tells me. A longtime advocate for sentencing reform, Berman is optimistic of the bill’s chances. “Senator Cruz in the past has not let GOP establishment figures stop him from being an aggressive and persistent voice for legal reforms he considers important. I am hopeful that Senator Cruz will fight the good fight on the SSA and other sentencing reform measures so as not to let old establishment folks like Senator Grassley keep the SSA and other proposals from coming up for a vote in the Senate.”

In a statement to the press on sentencing reform efforts, Senator Cruz said, “If you have violent criminals, if you have criminals who are using guns, who are using violence, who are dealing drugs to children, the criminal justice system should come down on them like a ton of bricks. But at the same time we need to recognize that young people make mistakes, and we should not live in a world of Les Miserables, where a young man finds his entire future taken away by excessive mandatory minimums.”

In prison, I felt like I was in a bad movie that kept repeating itself. And many inside felt the same way. I got good friends still inside suffering under the laws passed way back then. “I might get some play,” Shakim Bio, a hustler out of Queens who has been in since the early 90s for crack cocaine. “I’m trying to get back in court. Maybe these bills will help me.” And I hope so because a lot of dudes are still in the feds doing football numbers. But it appears that the tide has changed. It looks like sentence reform is getting serious as the bills roll out in Congress and the national media jumps on the bandwagon.

Coming home and finally making it out of the prison industrial complex was huge for me. I am in the enviable position of now getting a second chance at life and enjoying my freedom, but there are tens of thousands drug war prisoners still incarcerated in the Federal Bureau of Prisons serving unjust sentences. They need to be offered some relief instead of being left to rot. The reforms are a start, but more is needed. “I just need a chance,” Shakim Bio says. “I have learned my lesson. Just one chance is all I need.” But these bills are not retroactive, they will only help people with new cases.

According to Julie Stewart, The Smarter Sentencing Act would cut the mandatory minimum sentences in half. But only going forward, so a twenty year sentence like the one I served would become ten, a ten year sentence would become five and a five year sentence would become two. It would also cut the life sentences to 25 years.

If these changes would have taken place sooner it would have cut my time in half, a boon for both society and me, as I realized within my first five years of incarceration that I was finished with drugs and crime. The façade of being the stoner/drug dealer was gone.

“What was the point of you being there? What benefit did America get for your two decade incarceration?” Stewart asks referring to my case. “You told me once that you needed 10 years. I get it. But what was the next eleven years for?” I often wondered the same thing.

For me the nightmare is over. I am home and I am out. But there are many more still in the same predicament I was in and hopefully these sentencing reform efforts can help them. Because in truth locking me up for two decades didn’t further the ends of justice. All it did was cost the taxpayers a lot of money. Wasted resources and wasted time; that is the extent of what mandatory minimums create. We need to rethink our sentencing polices and these new bills are a good place to start.