Original publication: November 1994.
WOMEN, POT AND PRISON
JULIE STEWART, PRESIDENT, FAMM
Ruth Helgesen, at 53 years old, imagined that her golden years would be spent living peacefully with her male companion, Glenn, in their simple home in the isolated woods of northern Minnesota. Together they rebuilt their house and lived off the land. Until recently, they didn’t even have electricity. But Ruth and Glenn’s tranquil existence was permanently shattered when federal authorities found 713 marijuana plants growing on their property.
Glenn was the primary caretaker of the plants and admitted that he had smoked marijuana for 30 years. There was no evidence that directly linked Ruth to the plants, which weighed a total of eight pounds. But both Ruth and Glenn were charged with manufacturing marijuana. They were both sentenced to five years in federal prison without parole.
Ruth joins a rapidly growing number of women incarcerated in state and federal prisons for drug offenses. Today, one out of every three women in prison is there for a drug-related offense, up from one in eight a decade ago. In the federal prison system, 64% of the women serving time are drug offenders. It’s not that women are committing more crimes today; it’s simply that the penalties have changed and judges are now largely prohibited from giving women (or anyone else) probation.
In the mid-1980s, Congress adopted stiff mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, requiring five and 10 year prison terms without parole. The sentences were designed to be gender and race-neutral, so that all guilty parties would be given similar sentences. Unfortunately, gender-neutrality is one area in which mandatory minimum sentences have succeeded, to the detriment of many mothers and children in this country.
Melody Antonakos is serving a four-year federal prison sentence for a marijuana “conspiracy.” She is a 34-year-old mother of two boys who are seven and three years old. Her husband was also convicted and was sentenced to six years. Their children are living with relatives.
Melody can’t understand why the judge would sentence both parents to prison terms and leave their children parentless. “Why can’t at least one parent be with our children at home with home confinement or community work?” she asks. “Then I would feel like I’m helping someone in this world instead of thinking about whether my children will remember me after four years.” Melody believes that this kind of sentencing continues because “no one really knows about cases like mine. They think that if you get sentenced for X number of years, you are a bad, drugged-out person and you deserve it.”
Unfortunately, Melody is right. Most people assume that everyone who’s in prison belongs there, or they assume that marijuana is such a benign drug that it couldn’t possibly warrant a five or 10-year prison term. The public is wrong on both counts. There are thousands of people serving long mandatory prison sentences for marijuana offenses, and a growing number of them are women who were peripherally involved. Often the woman is the wife or girlfriend of the man involved in growing or selling marijuana. Her role can be as minor as simply knowing about her husband’s “crime.” That’s enough to link her to the “drug conspiracy” and be charged for the total amount of marijuana involved.
Conspiracy law has been widely utilized (and widely abused) in the War on Drugs. It effectively convicts anyone remotely involved in a drug offense. The law is written so broadly that it applies easily to low-level participants such as off-loaders, mules, couriers and spouses. These minor players are sentenced on the full scope of the drug deal, even though they may have had no idea of the quantity of drugs involved or the extent of the entire operation.
Lenny Higginbotham represents a typical conspiracy case. In 1990, Lenny was arrested after an informant named her as a participant in a marijuana-growing operation that had ended in 1989. The informant told the police about five different marijuana farms, including the one in which Lenny had been involved, in exchange for a reduction in his sentence. The 11 people charged and convicted on the informant’s testimony were held accountable for the total number of plants grown on all five farms: 12,500.
Lenny, who the court acknowledged as a “minor” player, agreed to plead guilty and accept a 10-year prison sentence instead of going to trial and risking a 24-year sentence. Her husband and several other codefendants went to trial and received sentences ranging from 24 years to life without parole. Lenny’s eight-year-old daughter, Amy, is now parentless and living with Lenny’s brother and sister-in-law. Amy seldom gets to visit Lenny or her father because they are incarcerated so far from home.
The senseless incarceration of Ruth, Melody, Lenny and hundreds, if not thousands, of women like them must serve as an alarm clock to awaken the sleeping public that still believes that marijuana offenses are treated lightly, women are seldom incarcerated and that everyone who’s in prison belongs there. It’s time to wake up and fight for justice.
