Fate Winslow is one of them. Crammed in a dorm with more than 80 other prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, he is serving out a life sentence. “Now pack[ed] in like sardines,” he wrote in a recent letter from the prison. They’re double-bunked and there’s no air conditioning to fight the Louisiana heat. “How is it fit to get 86 bodies no air?” he wondered. “Well you see the picture — very hot.”
“Let’s just say there are good days and bad days,” he wrote.
Winslow is sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labor without benefit of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence. Here’s why: In 2008, the year America elected a president who cemented his coolness by revealing he’d smoked pot the right way, Winslow played middleman in a deal that wound up with an undercover cop in possession of two dime bags of marijuana. He was homeless at the time and says he needed the $5 he got from the transaction to buy food.
The cop had initially asked Winslow for “a girl.” Instead of “a girl,” Winslow got some pot from a white dealer. Police arrested Winslow, but not the dealer, even though a marked $20 bill was found on the latter. For that — or perhaps for having the temerity to go to trial — Winslow was found guilty by the predominantly white jury and given life without parole.
