What happens when your Dad spends 25 years in prison for marijuana.
The drug war has cursed generations. We owe victims and their families more.
Evita Thompson, 41, didn’t see the gunman, she just saw a flash of fire. She started running around trying to help the other people in the crowd, not realizing that she’d been shot four times. This happened last May. “Wrong place, wrong time,” she says about her old neighborhood. She began to exhibit signs of PTSD.
“So I packed everything up and left. I've been in a depression ever since.” Despite pulling 16 hour shifts as a healthcare worker in a nursing home, she sleeps in her car in the few hours she has off, occasionally springing for a hotel room when she’s got extra cash. Otherwise she showers in the bathrooms of restaurants and gas stations.
She applied for a homelessness voucher, but hasn’t heard back. “It’s so hard to get help,” she says.
*******
Last week, I went to a panel about mass incarceration and clemency at Princeton University, a world away from the Michigan parking lots where Evita sleeps. The featured guests were the New Jersey attorney general, Matthew Platkin, Oregon Governor Kate Brown, and Evita’s father, Michael Thompson, who spent 25 years behind bars for selling pot to a police informant in Michigan in 1995. Even though he was unarmed when he sold the pot, police charged him with unlawful possession of guns that they found when they searched his home. He’d had a couple of nonviolent priors, so the prosecutor tapped the state’s habitual offender law. “A trap sentence,” Michael tells me. He got 42-60 years for a crime in which no one was killed, for a drug which is now legal in Michigan.
Evita was 14 when her father went to prison. Everything fell apart, she says. Her mother became deeply depressed—Michael was the love of her life. And Evita was at the worst age to lose her father, who’d been the disciplinarian in the family. She started running around with boys, knowing her depressed mother wouldn’t do much about it, and had a baby as a teenager. For most of her life she’s suffered from anxiety and panic attacks. And the fear that she wouldn’t see her father again. “I thought, I’m never going to see him again, unless it’s in a casket.”
For 25 years, Michael watched killers with shorter sentences than his go free. Even after Michigan legalized pot, he sat in prison, suffering through a severe bout of Covid alone, in an empty room without a TV. He had to wash his clothes in the toilet.
Michael is a spiffy dresser. He’d come to the Princeton panel in a fedora and beige pea coat. I can’t imagine what had been going through his head when he’d had to scrub his ugly orange jumpsuit in a toilet.
Like any prison sentence, Michael’s incarceration has reverberated through the generations like some horrid Biblical curse. Michael had four kids. His only son died when Michael was behind bars. His youngest daughter, Princess, was three when he got sent away. The family had to move because her mother couldn’t cover the home mortgage on her own.
“Every Christmas, I used to wish my Dad was coming back,” Princess tells me. He started to refuse seeing visitors when she was nine and Evita was a teenager. They aren’t sure why, but Michael told me years ago that he did it because he couldn’t bear for his family to see him in shackles and the ugly orange jumpsuit. He made an exception for his mother’s funeral and had to walk into the church handcuffed, everyone staring.
After years of lobbying by activists like Shaun King and eventually even Snoop Dog and Kim Kardashian, the parole board granted him clemency and he walked out of Muskegon Correctional facility in January of 2021. Local and some national TV stations swarmed the scene, catapulting him into a kind of celebrity.
Princess went to the prison for his release on that freezing winter night.
“It was funny, I was there when he got out, and he didn’t recognize me! I was like ‘Hey Daddy!” and he was like, “Who are you?”
“I’m Princess, Daddy! And he laughed and said, “You’re all grown up!”
Evita and Princess inherited their Dad’s sense of humor, so she’s telling me about it like it’s a funny story, while on the other end of the line my jaw drops in horror.
Today, Michael does panels with fancy people like the Governor of Oregon and the Attorney General of New Jersey. He’s revered in the criminal justice reform community and the legal pot industry. But none of that pseudo-worship translates into help for the people he cares for most.
“He always invites me to events and I’m like, “Dad, I can’t just come, I’ve got a job!” Princess says. Princess’s job, cleaning hotel rooms, is not enough for her to rent her own place. After her boyfriend kicked her out, she and her nine year old daughter slept in her car and now share a two-bedroom with her niece and her three children. Five years ago, she’d been caught with counterfeit coupons and nailed for felony “embezzlement.” Although she only spent one day in jail and her probationary period is over, employers always say no when they find out about her record.
Michael found out that two of his daughters are homeless from a documentary filmmaker making a movie about his story. The documentary, The Sentence of Michael Thompson, is generating Oscar buzz. But none of the attention is being directed to help his family.
He tries to do normal Dad stuff, like taking Princess to get a tire fixed “to this guy I know won’t milk her out of money.” But criminal reform fame, apparently, does not translate into a large financial windfall for him to help either of his daughters get and apartment after a quarter century of missed wages.
“When your kids are in trouble … it’s like a mental incarceration,” he says. “25 years I wasn’t around.”
***
The Princeton panel was informative. Brown and Platkin outlined policy initiatives, including a mass clemency by Brown. But it was Michael who had all the undergrads and even Brown’s gruff security detail leaning forward in their seats. Michael is a powerful and emotive storyteller. Later, I told him he should teach Democratic politicians how to craft better narratives, but he gave me a nasty look. “I’m not a politician. I don’t lie.” Apparently spending extra time with politicians is not on his bucket list.
After the panel, we all munched on tiny finger foods at the reception. His childhood friend, Jimmy, who tries to come to these things for support, had brought food from his restaurant in Flint, Michigan, the King Road Restaurant. We stared longingly at his burger while choking down mystery amuses bouches.
“This … fish ball? Is pretty good? ” Michael tentatively offered. “Sure, I believe you. Keep it away from me,” Jimmy gruffly replied. When Michael had started crying during the panel, Jimmy, a large man with striking blue eyes, just walked up there and hugged him before unobtrusively going back to his seat.
At the teeny-tiny food reception, undergrads and other members of the audience approached Michael shyly, with reverence, to thank him for sharing his story. They seemed star-struck. I hovered about, curious about how people engage with Michael now that he’s a cause celebre. It turns out, they engage by saying the same thing about his bravery roughly 900 times. It seemed exhausting and Michael left as soon as it was polite to do so. I could see that Jimmy’s job also included, “Being a normal person that Michael can have a normal conversation with.”
Michael story post-release is a stratospheric success. The documentary that’s generating Oscar buzz is distributed by MSNBC. MSNBC anchor Ari Melber regularly features segments on Michael.
Michaels’ foundation, the Michael Thompson Clemency Project, is fighting for the release of close to a dozen men. He’s clearly inspired dozens, if not hundreds, of starry-eyed activists to commit themselves to the cause of clemency.
But he’s (a very healthy) 72 and his travel and speaking schedule is grueling. You get the sense that he wishes he could go hang out with his grandkids or go fishing, but has committed his life to advocating for clemency, because he’s the only one who can do it.
Michael had done music marketing in his past life. As part of his community work, he got rival gangs to meet and pledge a ceasefire in Flint in the 1980s, earning a key to the city from the Mayor. And he counseled men behind bars, urging them to take responsibility for their children and give up on violence. He’s a brilliant advocate to any audience.
It wasn’t just undergrads who were dazzled. Brown also looked ecstatic to get a picture with Michael before the event. I’m happy Brown has taken up the cause of clemency, of course. But something about everyone’s groveling felt wrong. Like, now you care? Now that it’s a hip cause, rather than a political liability? Another liberal Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, knew about Michael for years, but instead of granting him executive clemency, she waited for the glacially slow parole board. Years during which his grandkids grew and his daughters became homeless. A year in which Micheal got very sick.
And the way everyone circled him now, eager to get close for a fashionable issue … I’m not criticizing Brown, who just ordered a mass clemency, or slamming eager Princeton undergrads. It feels like we’re all looking to Michael for catharsis. Like we’re collectively saying, “We‘re sorry this happened to you. It’s unimaginable,” followed by “All’s well that ends well!”
It’s not though.
Evita says Michael tells her to get more sleep. How can she? His former wife has dementia and Evita wants to do everything in her power to make sure neither of her parents ends up in the kind of place where she works.
“I love them,” she tells me of her wards in the nursing hospital. “But other people, they got no passion and they don't pay us enough. The homes definitely abuse these people. I need a house because I’d never take my mom or dad to a place like that.”
***
We all know that mass incarceration impacts families and communities. But we rarely ponder the grisly details and indignities, or how the intergenerational trauma created by mass incarceration shapes the lives of children.
Colton and Collin Kavitz were 10 and 11 when they were packed off to foster care because authorities found meth in their mother’s house. Her boyfriend was a dealer and she’d end up with 24 year sentence—for his meth.
In one foster home, the two boys were locked in a dungeon-like basement. In another, the woman told them her husband liked to take showers with the children. In another the lady of the house liked to parade around naked in front of them. They ended up in a group home, and then in and out of more foster homes.
“Living with my mom, having the drug shit going on wasn’t really that bad compared to where they were trying to save us,” Collin says. “My mom was a first time nonviolent drug offender. That doesn’t seem right. She didn’t kill anybody.”
***
The last time Faith Canada’s saw her dad, Fate Winslow, it was in a casket, as Evita had feared would be the last time she saw Michael.
Fate had sold an undercover cop $10 worth of pot while he was living on the street in 2008. He went to trial, and because of the “trap” of habitual offender laws (his priors had been nonviolent), he got life without the possibility of parole.
In college, Faith took a criminal course to try and make sense of her father’s sentence. One day, she walked into class and they were talking about the case. At the end of class, she stood up and asked if she could say something. “That’s my Dad.” Everyone gaped at her in shock.
Then, a miracle happened. Louisiana changed a criminal statute. The change allows defendants to claim ineffective counsel in the sentencing part of the trial, rather than just the guilt or innocence part. Winslow was, in fact, guilty of selling $10 worth of weed to a cop. But you don’t have to be a hippie to think that life without the possibility of parole is a bit harsh.
The Innocence Project New Orleans took up his case, and he walked out of prison a free man in late 2020. He and his daughter reconnected, went out to lunch his first day out. He’d wanted to try McDonald’s fish sandwich.
Eventually, he bought his daughter a car. He demanded that the salesman be sure the oil levels and tires were solid. She felt like she finally had a Dad.
Six months after his release, Fate was gunned down in an apparent armed robbery. Her aunt called his daughter with the news. She started screaming.
To this day she has no idea who killed him, because the same police department that spent one night putting him in prison for life for weed has yet to find his killer.
He’d always wanted a grandchild, but Faith was worried she couldn't have kids because she’d previously suffered a stillbirth. A few months after her Dad died, Faith had a healthy baby boy named Lennox. She’s excited to tell Lennox all about his grandfather when he’s older. She also wishes they could have met.
Faith is disconnected from the rest of the family. The car her dad tenderly fixed up for her broke down and she needs a new one to get to work. But she can’t afford $3,000 to get a loan to buy a car to get to work to make money to pay her loan—and also take care of Lennox.
I’ve reached out to various marijuana advocacy groups who say there’s not really anything they can do to help the children of wrongly incarcerated people.
“I really wish my dad was here,” she texts me.