This story is published as part of Teen Vogue’s Economic Security Project fellowship.
Faith Winslow Canada says her infant son has the same wide, infectious smile as her father. “He is so goofy, just like him,” she tells Teen Vogue. From the security of his infant walker, her son often waddles over to a photo of his grandfather perched within his reach. Every day, says Winslow Canada, “he just smiles and touches the picture. It makes me feel like, yeah, you know who your grandfather was.”
“My favorite thing about my dad is his smile,” she continues. “You can see him smiling from a mile away. He always smiled, even around sad times. He would be the one to cheer up everybody else.”
During our interview, Winslow Canada, 24, switches between referring to her father, Fate Winslow, in the past and present tense. He was killed in May 2021, a few weeks before his 54th birthday, and just five months after his release from prison. He had been incarcerated — and originally given a life sentence — for delivering $20 worth of marijuana.
Winslow’s case began in 2008 when, as reported in Rolling Stone, someone who turned out to be an undercover cop asked Winslow to get him two $10 bags of weed. Winslow didn’t have any marijuana on him to sell, but the cop offered to pay him $5 to find a dealer. Winslow was homeless at the time and would’ve been able to pocket that $5 to spend on food.
But that $5 cost Winslow more than a decade in prison, and the amount, of course, pales in comparison to the multibillion dollar size of today’s marijuana industry. According to Forbes, legal marijuana sales are estimated to make over $31.8 billion by the end of 2023, and possibly reach $50.7 billion in yearly sales by 2028. The rapid growth of the industry has translated into hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
A job, says Winslow Canada, is exactly what her father — and countless other people in similar situations — really needed. “Some of those men did that to put food on the table,” she says. “My dad was homeless at the time. He did it so he can eat, and didn't even know what he was getting himself into."
Winslow Canada continues, "[The cannabis industry] should be the ones working to get them out and giving them a job. They should be the ones having rallies and actually doing something about it. Help the people who are selling what you are selling, but instead of selling it at a big company, they're doing it to feed their families or put a little money in their pocket or get a hotel room so they won't be sleeping on the street.”
Because Winslow had prior convictions, Louisiana state law considered him a “habitual offender” and sentenced him to life in prison. (The dealer who supplied the marijuana, who was white, was not arrested, even though officers found their marked dollar bills on him, according to Rolling Stone’s report.) Winslow's case later gained media attention and support from the Last Prisoner Project and Innocence Project New Orleans for being representative of racist over-policing and over-incarceration with minor marijuana-possession offenses.
“It's just crazy because still in Louisiana people are getting put in prison… because they have a certain amount of marijuana on them,” says Winslow Canada. “It doesn't make any sense to me.”
Winslow Canada says she didn’t get to spend much time with her father as a child. He’d been in and out of prison since she was about four years old. Prior to his release in 2020, the last time she’d seen him was in the courtroom where he received his life sentence. She was nine at the time.
“We went to the courthouse and we sat there. When they started bringing the men in, I saw my dad and he was smiling,” she says, recalling how they were seated close enough to mouth words to each other. “I remember my hair was pretty, and he was asking me how I was doing and how was school. Then the judge saw us talking and he told us to be quiet.”
Winslow Canada wrote her father letters with life updates and birthday wishes but, she says, the messages never made it to her father. When she was around 18 years old and living on her own, she tried mailing a letter from her new address. Sure enough, her father wrote back. “He apologized for not being around,” Winslow Canada remembers. “He didn't really understand why his sentence was that long. He talked about how much he missed me and how he wished he was out to enjoy life.” Thanks to the Last Prisoner Project and Innocence Project's advocacy, as well as a 2020 change in Louisiana state law, Winslow was ultimately released in December 2020 after serving 12 years.
For 20-year-old Jennifer Ruiz, however, even significant and relevant changes to Michigan law haven’t brought her father, Rudi Gammo, back home to the family. Gammo operated a medical-marijuana business called Green Cross for years in Detroit. Marijuana regulation across the state had proven “murky” and uneven, but enforcement was often aggressive if officials believed a law had been broken. Gammo was sentenced to five and a half years in prison in 2018, the same year Detroit voters approved the legalization of adult-use recreational marijuana for people 21 and older.
“It's absurd that he’s in there,” says Ruiz, especially because the current county prosecutor, Karen McDonald, agrees Gammo should be released (the case had been handled by her predecessor). “It makes me so upset because it's, like, now that [adult-use marijuana is] legal, why does he still have to be in there?”
She adds, “It doesn't matter if he did it when it was illegal. That was the past, this is the present. He shouldn't be in there now that it is legal. It doesn't make sense to me.”
In recent years, marijuana legalization has made steady but uneven progress in the US. Voters in the 2022 midterm elections passed bills that progressed adult-use marijuana in Missouri and Maryland, while voters in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Arkansas voted against progressive marijuana legislation. With those midterm results, marijuana has now been legalized or decriminalized to some degree in 31 states and DC, with medical-marijuana use legalized in 37 states and DC.
Still, hundreds of thousands of people continue to be arrested for marijuana-related offenses nationwide. In fact, more people were arrested for “cannabis-related crimes” than for violent crimes in 2019, and more than 90% of those cannabis-related arrests were for possession, according to FBI data released in 2020.
“We all agree that it's unfair for him to be in there,” says Ruiz, who says her father calls home from prison a few times a day. “It's not like he did something so serious, you know? In my eyes, it's not something that he should be in there for. He shouldn't be taken away from his family for this long. If anything, I don't think he should have gotten five years of being in there for his punishment. That's why we're so devastated about this."
In October, President Biden made an announcement that, on its face, seemed to push forward the justice-focused approach to marijuana legalization. The president tweeted that he’d be pardoning “all prior federal offenses of simple possession of marijuana.” The official pardons will make it much easier for the formerly incarcerated to navigate public life, as they’ll no longer be subject to some of the employment, housing, and voting restrictions that exclude people with criminal records.
Biden’s move has the potential to impact about 6,500 people, but no one is currently in federal prison on simple possession charges alone — which means no one will be released from prison as a result of Biden’s announcement. Those who are impacted by the law will still have visible charges on their record, as the president does not have the authority to grant full record expungement. For those convicted at the state level, where the vast majority of simple marijuana possession convictions happen, a White House statement urged governors to issue similar pardons.
Most recently, the governor of Oregon pardoned past state-level convictions for simple marijuana possession of one ounce or less, which impacted an estimated 45,000 people. The pardon is limited to individuals who were at least 21 years old at the time of the charge, with no other charges; also, the case must not involve any victims.
“Our family just wants him home,” says Ruiz, who describes her father as “the glue” of their five-person family. “It makes us so stressed out. All he's thinking about is, I just wanna go home to my kids. I just wanna go home to my family.”
Winslow Canada’s dream of having her father in her life was tragically cut short by his death, but she remembers him as “a very loving, genuine, trustworthy person” and sees his unforgettable smile spread across her own son’s face. When asked what advice she might offer other families with a loved one behind bars facing a long sentence, she pauses for a beat before answering: “My advice to them would be to just continue telling their family member they love them. Because the world doesn't and the system doesn't. Continue to show that family member you love them and continue to write letters, send pictures, and force the issue.”
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