Richard Bolden doesn't deny that he has made mistakes. Over his 41 years of life he has been convicted of trafficking cocaine and jumping bail and has made a series of other poor choices.

But the 41-year-old father of four doesn't believe that he deserves to sit in prison until the day he dies for a marijuana offense. A judge in Houston County disagreed.

Known now for the rest of his life as Alabama state inmate #298448, Bolden has repeatedly been in trouble with the law, but there is no violence on his rap sheet.

Bolden was arrested in Dothan in August of 2011, and the charge was automatically upgraded from possession to trafficking because he was found to have possessed 2.4 pounds of marijuana, though prosecutors did not prove that he actually sold the drug.

If police had found less than 2.2 pounds - approximately one kilogram - of pot, it would have been considered a possession charge, for which he would have gotten no more than 10 years in prison under Alabama sentencing guidelines.

Instead, he was sentenced on Feb. 17, 2015, to life in prison for trafficking marijuana.

'Trafficking weight'

As nearby states like Arkansas and Florida legalize marijuana for medical and recreational use, Alabama remains stalwart in its prohibition.

For Bolden, who is an inmate at Alabama's Elmore Correctional Facility, the fact that he was convicted of a nonviolent marijuana crime in a weed-averse state has meant the difference between a few years in prison and a lifetime behind bars.

"All over the United States they are legalizing the use of marijuana while here in Alabama people are being convicted to life sentences," Bolden wrote in a Jan. 26, 2016, jailhouse letter to AL.com. "My charge should have been reduced to possession but because the prosecutor knew he could give me a life sentence because of my one prior [Class A] conviction out of the state of Florida he pursued my case viciously."

Bolden was also found to be in possession of 30 grams of cocaine - enough to be considered a "trafficking weight" of the drug. But that was handled as a separate case for which he received a separate sentence of 104 years for cocaine trafficking more than seven months after he was sentenced to life for the marijuana trafficking charge.

Bolden, who goes by the nickname "Gambino," points out that he was not caught with drugs on his person. His was instead an instance of "constructive possession" - meaning that drugs were found elsewhere and deemed to be his - based on a search of his home that he believes the police did not have the right to carry out.

After a jury found Bolden guilty of marijuana trafficking in November 2014, Assistant Houston County District Attorney Kristen Shields defended the way he was prosecuted, as The Dothan Eagle reported at the time.

"The jury definitely got this right because Bolden is an extreme trafficker in this community that has caused major problems for years," Shields said after Bolden's marijuana trafficking conviction. "Through solid investigation and diligent police work law enforcement was able to finally locate him, locate large quantities of his drugs and some cash from the first search warrant."

Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Horton denied requests to interview Bolden in prison at Elmore or via phone, citing his criminal history. Horton insisted that any contact with the prisoner be made via mail.

"Are you familiar with the inmate's background? He has a lengthy prior criminal history in multiple states (Virginia, Florida, Alabama) dating back to 1994," Horton said via email last year. "Based on your knowledge of the inmate's criminal history, do you consider his drug trafficking offenses to be minor, and his current sentence unjust?"

Richard Bolden is currently incarcerated at Alabama's Elmore Correctional Facility. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)

'Very harsh sentencing'

Maria Morris, senior supervising staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center, says a key component of the system that sentences nonviolent offenders like Bolden to life in prison is the fact that Alabama has one of the most aggressive approaches to marijuana offenders of any state in the nation.

"Alabama has very harsh sentencing, especially if you've got any priors, and we see it with a lot of low-level offenses ratcheting up with repetition," she told AL.com in an interview.

"One thing we have in Alabama is a very low threshold for when something becomes a felony. Marijuana possession is one of them. You're looking at something the rest of the country has decided we don't want to throw people away for, and that's what we are doing in Alabama."

In April 2016, Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore - who has since been suspended from the court - spoke out against Alabama's marijuana sentencing regime in a special opinion.

Moore wrote the opinion after he concurred with his court's ruling denying Houston County man Carroll Brooker a review of the case that put him behind bars for life without parole for marijuana trafficking. Because he had prior felony convictions, the courts were required under state law to issue the sentence after Brooker - who is now 77 years old - was caught with 2.8 pounds of marijuana in 2011.

"In my view, Brooker's sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for a non-violent, drug-related crime reveals grave flaws in our statutory sentencing scheme," wrote Moore, who described Brooker's sentence as "excessive and unjustified."

"I urge the legislature to revisit that statutory sentencing scheme to determine whether it serves an appropriate purpose."

There are vast disparities between different states' sentencing guidelines, even in the Southeast.

In South Carolina, a second offense of selling 10 to 100 pounds of marijuana is a felony punishable by only five to 20 years in prison. In Tennessee, selling between half an ounce and 10 pounds of pot is punishable by one to six years in prison; 10 to 70 pounds gets you two to 12 years, 70 to 300 pounds gets you 8 to 30 years and selling more than 300 pounds still only gets you 15 to 60 years.

There is no amount of marijuana that can earn you life in prison in the state of Tennessee, according to its sentencing guidelines.

But in Alabama, being classified as a "habitual felony offender" - meaning that one has previously been convicted of one or more felonies - initiates an escalation of penalties, according to the state code. That escalation can quickly result in a crime like possession of 2.4 pounds of marijuana being treated as Class A felony marijuana trafficking, and thereby punishable by as much as life behind bars.

Richard Bolden was sentenced to life in prison for marijuana trafficking. (Courtesy Richard Bolden)

'Entirely unreasonable'

Bolden appealed his marijuana trafficking conviction, claiming the drugs were found during an improper search of his residence, but Alabama Criminal Court of Appeals Judge J. Elizabeth Kellum denied the appeal in September 2015.

Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Samuel Henry Welch dissented in the opinion, writing that the Dothan Police Department did not have probable cause to search the home where the drugs Bolden was convicted of trafficking were found.

"[T]he affidavit overwhelmingly presents only [Dothan Police] Officer Mock's pure speculation that illegal drugs were probably in the trailer on Eddins Road at the time the warrant was issued," Welch wrote. He added that "the warrant was so lacking in probable cause as to 'as to (sic) render official belief in its existence entirely unreasonable.'"

But Kellum's opinion prevailed and Bolden's appeal was ultimately denied.

Bolden's case is just one of many in which Alabamians have been sentenced to long prison terms for nonviolent marijuana crimes as states across the nation have been decriminalizing the drug.

Alabama criminals often get significantly shorter prison terms for similar drug crimes and even violent crimes, a fact that Bolden in his January 2015 letter calls "selective prosecution."

Bolden is further frustrated by an enforcement system rife with racial disparities.

As of of July 2015, about 27 percent of Alabama's population was black, while 69.5 percent was white, according to the U.S. Census. But as of Oct. 17, 2016, more than 80 percent of the 220 state prisoners convicted of first-degree marijuana possession were black, according to the Alabama Sentencing Commission.

"District Attorney Douglas Valeska has maliciously prosecuted me selectively while giving others with more drug amounts" lower sentences, Bolden wrote last year.

Valeska, who retired in January, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

'Buried alive'

Alabama's prisons are under federal investigation for issues including chronic overcrowding. Packing more and more people into existing prisons is not the answer, Morris said.

"We need to think about if we really want that to be our approach," Morris said.

"If we stop putting people in prisons for life for relatively minor offenses, we won't have to have as many prisons, and we won't have to pay as much money to keep people in prison under constitutional conditions, never mind the lives that have been thrown away."

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (center) joins Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn (center left) on a tour of Limestone Correctional Facility in Harvest, Alabama, April 4, 2016. (Bob Gathany/bgathany@AL.com)

Last year, Gov. Robert Bentley proposed spending $800 million to build a handful of massive new prisons in order to address many of the problems facing the state's prison system.

"For decades Alabama prisons have become increasingly overcrowded, dangerous to both inmates and our corrections officers and incredibly costly to taxpayers. But that is going to change beginning now," Bentley said in a February 2016 speech announcing the initial plan, which has since undergone significant changes.

Bolden rejects that logic.

"I think it's horrible that some can receive life for marijuana with one prior felony while in other states trafficking limits are 10 to 20 pounds. But in Jim Crow Alabama it's 2.2 [pounds]," the inmate wrote.

"The sentencing guidelines are the problem with the overcrowding. The government thinks building more prisons is the solution but it isn't. All that's doing is moving a group of people to another facility where the problems still exist."

Bolden's ex-girlfriend Annie Redding - they've broken up since he was incarcerated in 2015, largely because of the stress and desperation of his situation - says that she has a difficult time reckoning with what was lost when he was sent away forever.

"I never discuss Richie's situation with anyone because I feel that I am mentally going to fall to pieces to even talk about it," she said after meeting with AL.com in a Dothan barbershop last year.

"No one can imagine what I'm feeling. It's like watching the love of your life being buried alive and there's nothing you can do about it. I'm watching him dying every visitation."