It was 2012, and Ferrell Scott was watching television inside Pennsylvania's Allenwood federal penitentiary when he learned that the sale of marijuana, something he was given a life sentence for just four years earlier, was becoming legal in two states.

Colorado had approved its recreational use, the inmate learned from the broadcast, and so had Washington.

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Scott had been struggling with depression since he was incarcerated in March 2008. But he felt a bit of hope as he watched the framework that had put people like him away without parole begin to crumble.

The country was changing, he thought. Perhaps that would mean a change on the federal level, too. Today, 11 states and Washington D.C., have legalized recreational use of pot. Scott, still incarcerated at 56, is angry about the hypocrisy.

"You would think that selling marijuana is the worst thing in the world because I was given a life sentence for it," he wrote to me from prison recently.

Ferrell Scott Provided

Scott and hundreds of other people of color have been living behind bars, watching businessmen like Kevin Murphy, the CEO of one of the nation's most lucrative marijuana companies, get rich. In the first quarter of this year, his company, Acreage Holdings, reported revenue of $12.9 million.

The top tier of the legal pot industry is run almost exclusively by white men, and retailers, dispensaries and pharmacies nationwide are expected to take in nearly $45 billion in revenue in 2024 from all cannabinoid sales — which include marijuana along with over-the-counter items like CBD ointments and supplements, according to a study by Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics.

Scott said he wasn't getting rich dealing pot, just trying to make a living for himself and his two kids. If Scott were selling large quantities of marijuana today, he might be on magazine covers hailing him as an entrepreneur. But because he was selling large quantities of marijuana a decade ago, he's a lifer.

Racial disparities surrounding drug enforcement didn't begin with state legalization. But Scott's story and the legalization movement highlight a stark reality: Whites have long been getting more of a break on dealing marijuana while blacks have been getting more frequently incarcerated.

First Step and third strikes

The difference in the rate of pot use between whites and blacks in this country is nil. However, the difference in the rate of arrests and convictions is vast, according to data from an American Civil Liberties Union study. In states with the largest disparities, blacks were six times more likely than whites to get arrested for possession in 2010, the last year of the study.

About 84% of the more than 2,000 marijuana offenders who were federally sentenced in 2018 were people of color, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Only 11% were white, even though whites make up more than 60% of the U.S. population.

Past strikes Ferrell Scott was given a life sentence on a third-strike charge. A look at his previous charges, most of which happened in the 1980s. Click below to view the full document. View document

Scott has been in prison for 11 years on a third strike. He was arrested and convicted twice in Texas in the late 1980s for drug possession and distribution; he ultimately served about two years of a 15-year sentence for violating probation.

Every day in prison gives him time to think about his biggest regret — not being there for his youngest children. One daughter, Serrell, was 15, and his son, Skyler, was entering his senior year in high school with a bright future in football when Scott was sentenced to life in Allenwood.

Now Serrell is 26 and has three children of her own. His son never made it as far as they had dreamed. He played professional arena football but lost his focus, Scott said during a recent phone interview: "(I) feel like I failed him."

The monotony of daily prison life also gives Scott time to think about the arrest in Texas that led to his life sentence, and his decision not to take a plea deal.

Scott recalled that he was on his way to Skyler's football practice in 2008 when police pulled him over less than a mile from his son's school. He had been indicted by a grand jury on marijuana charges dating to February 2007. A warrant was issued for his arrest in March 2008.

Ultimately, he was found guilty of conspiracy to possess and intent to distribute more than 2,000 pounds of marijuana.

Scott said he had used a big rig truck to haul and sell marijuana after years of hauling legal freight failed to pay the bills. He also had a couple of men working for him doing the same thing, he said.

He was offered a plea deal — eight years in exchange for the names of others who worked with him selling drugs. He refused, opting instead to go to trial, never thinking that eight years could turn into a life sentence.

The federal First Step Act, enacted last year, will now rescue people from receiving a mandatory life sentence on a third-strike drug charge. But people who are incarcerated for life today are likely to remain.

The law's passage was meant to eliminate racial disparities in sentencing for crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine. But the use of third-strike provisions in marijuana sentencing and plea deals can also have racial implications.

In lower-level cases, white defendants are more likely to have the harshest charges reduced, according to Carlos Berdejo, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who studied thousands of criminal cases and published his findings in "Criminalizing Race: Racial Disparities in Plea Bargaining."

Indicted on previous charges Ferrell Scott was indicted by a grand jury in 2008 before he was arrested. Scott says he had stopped dealing drugs for months when the warrant was issued for his arrest. Click below to view the full document. View documents

"Many of us already have preconceived notions about individuals based on certain traits, race being one of them," Berdejo said during an interview.

Attempts to right the racial inequities surrounding marijuana sentencing are being rolled out slowly across the country. Massachusetts and California started equity and licensing programs designed to help blacks and Latinos open stores and cash in on the legal market.

In Texas, where Scott was prosecuted on federal charges, state legislators legalized hemp this year. After that, prosecutors began dropping cases involving small amounts of recreational marijuana.

Black entrepreneurs are slowly moving into the industry. Sam Adetunji, whose family is from Nigeria, started Veriheal in 2016. The online company pairs cannabis doctors with patients who might need the drug.

Despite his success, Adetunji is aware that the nation's history of overincarcerating blacks pushes many people away from the legal industry. Some of his friends have been jailed on marijuana charges.

"There’s a lot of fear with getting into the industry for minorities because there are so many people who look like us getting thrown into jail," Adetunji said.

Entrepreneurs in the legal industry must use their wealth and resources to lobby Congress for the release of former dealers like Scott, he added.

"People had to do what they had to do to make ends meet and feed their families," the businessman explained. "Now that the laws have been changed, there hasn’t been as a big of a movement to get those people out of jail."

'I don't think I did anything any different'

It's not unusual for fights to break out at Allenwood, causing the entire facility to be on lockdown — something Scott says happened recently when, in the middle of our conversation, the phone went dead.

Guards ran toward the doors of the high-security facility to get the inmates who were in a skirmish under control. An announcement was made over the loudspeakers that inmates would be confined to their cells, Scott says.

"It's so hard to make any kind of plans in here. It's always something going on. It can go from 0 to 100 in no time. Everything can be calm one minute and the next all hell can break loose. I absolutely hate this place," Scott wrote in an email. "The only thing I have in common with the people here is that I'm locked up just like them; other than that we have nothing in common."

Ferrell Scott has been incarcerated for pot distribution since 2008. Provided

Scott applied for clemency, and the prosecutor in his case wrote a letter on the inmate's behalf stating that he believed the life sentence was wrong.

The clemency was denied by the Obama administration in 2016. That decision sent him into a tailspin and caused him to write in a letter that he wished he were dead.

Three years later, his conversations with his mother help keep him going. She's 96, and he calls her every Sunday. "I really hope something can happen, and I can be with her for whatever time she has left," Scott said.

Still, Scott doesn't think he would do anything differently in terms of the plea deal. He wouldn't implicate the people who worked with him. He says he was thinking of the safety of his family and the future of his children when he made that decision. And even more important, he doesn't feel like he should have been in a position where a plea deal or life in prison were his only options.

"You see a lot of states making (pot) legal," Scott says. "I don't think I did anything any different."

This is the second installment in a series about prisoners serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes. This series is being published in conjunction with the Buried Alive Project, which is working on a video-driven Letters From Lifers campaign.

Eileen Rivers is the digital content editor for USA TODAY's Editorial Page and the editor of the newspaper's online vertical Policing the USA. Reach her on Twitter @msdc14