MARSHALL — Before he sent her to prison for smoking a marijuana joint while on probation, Saline County Circuit Judge Dennis Rolf had a question for Blair Clevenger.
“When are you due?†Rolf asked on Monday morning.
Wearing a pink jail smock and appearing by video from the county jail, the 29-year-old woman gave her answer.
“March 25.â€
Rolf paused. He had a quizzical look on his face. Maybe he was doing the math in his head. “You might be out by then.â€
Probably not. Clevenger was sent to the state Department of Corrections by Rolf for three years, her original sentence for drug possession that she pleaded guilty to in 2019. That she was in the county jail at all, and is now headed to state prison, is a lesson in the broken American criminal justice system, where too many of the wrong people are in jail or prison, often because they battle drug addiction or poverty, or both. They feed the country’s incarceration rates, which are .
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“It is always frustrating to see someone needlessly imprisoned. But, instead of treating a prison sentence like the very solemn thing it is, too many courts view it as a punishment of first resort,†says Matt Palmer, the district defender in Saline County and one of Clevenger’s public defenders. “There may be certain occasions that warrant the serious response of completely separating a dangerous person from society, but a pregnant woman treating her morning sickness is definitely not one of them. That is absolutely not what prison is for.â€
Rolf, a Democrat who is known for his harsh drug sentences, obviously disagrees. In the past two years, four of Rolf’s previous nonviolent drug-possession sentences have been commuted by Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican.
Clevenger’s case is a slow-motion tragedy that helps explain why Missouri in the number of people in its state prisons who are there on probation or parole violations, many of them technical in nature, as compared to more serious violations, such as being convicted of another crime.
In 2019, Clevenger was a passenger in her own car when it was pulled over by Marshall police, who found a bag of crushed up opiate pills and a syringe. Clevenger, who got her first alcohol-related offense as a minor, and later pleaded guilty to two DWIs, battles addiction. She was in jail for a month after her arrest because she couldn’t afford the cash bail.
She was sentenced to 120 days “shock time†in jail, with a 3-year sentence to be suspended if she made it unscathed through five years of probation. Ask any Missouri defendant, particularly in rural areas, about probation in this state, and they will tell you that it is not set up to help somebody battling addiction get their lives back on track. Such defendants are “doomed to fail,†Kansas City defense attorney Kent Gipson wrote last year in a memo to Parson describing the judicial goings-on in Saline and Lafayette counties.
Sure enough, Clevenger, who after she got out of prison moved to Columbia to participate in a sober-living program, was soon accused of violating probation. It starts with a missed hearing, the sort of unnecessary legal proceedings many rural judges schedule to tether defendants to their court, much like they used to with “payment review hearings†to collect court costs, before the Missouri Supreme Court ended that practice. Clevenger missed a hearing and was arrested and jailed with cash bail she couldn’t afford.
She was released on a personal recognizance bond, and a few months later, Prosecuting Attorney Tim Thompson filed a motion to revoke her probation, in part because she hadn’t yet obtained employment. She was arrested and jailed again, and then released again, and told to come back in a few months.
On Oct. 12, she appeared for a case review and admitted to the court she had smoked a joint to ease the morning sickness that had come on during a pregnancy. Rolf revoked her bond, arrested her and put her in jail on a $15,000 cash bail, which, of course, she could not afford.
The sober home where she was living wants her back, her public defenders told the judge. The probation office recommended that she stay in the treatment program she was participating in, rather than go back to prison.
“What do you think?†Rolf asked the prosecutor, who stood in front of the long rows of wooden benches in the courtroom, like pews in an empty church.
“My main concern is with the baby,†Thompson said.
Now, that baby is likely to be born in prison, where his or her mother is headed, because she smoked a joint, which in Missouri voters made legal a year ago for medicinal purposes and can be purchased at storefront locations across the state, including in Sedalia just down Highway 65 from the courthouse.
This is what a broken system looks like: A pregnant woman battling drug addiction, sent to prison to be a burden on taxpayers because a judge in small-town Missouri sacrifices defendants on the altar of Old Testament justice.
“There is nothing prison can do for a person that was already thriving in a community-based treatment program other than set them up for long-term failure,†Palmer says. “I can’t imagine how a pregnant woman would feel after being plucked from a winning treatment program. She now has to plan to have her child while she’s shackled to a hospital bed. There is no situation where that promotes a woman’s long-term success.â€