The Terrible Cost of The Sentence

When federal law enforcement authorities came to Cindy Shank’s Lansing, Michigan, home one early morning in 2007, it was a knock on the door she said she’d long dreaded. Six years earlier, her then-boyfriend had been involved with illicit drugs, and she had been questioned about criminal activity in the house they shared. Her boyfriend had since died, and police did not pursue the case against her.

Now, Shank was married to someone else and living a perfectly middle-class life, of jobs and family as the mother of two girls with a third on the way. Regardless, in short order she was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison—with very