Women to Watch: Stephanie Shepard

Stephanie Shepard served nine years in federal prison and five years of probation for conspiracy to distribute marijuana in 2010, despite being a first-time, non-violent offender. She came home to Sacramento in 2019 to find a billion-dollar industry doing the same thing that cost her nine years of her life.

“You really don’t feel the weight of what it is until you get out and you see it for yourself and you walk into a dispensary for the first time and you walk down the street and people are smoking and no one’s getting arrested,” Shepard says. “That’s when it’s like, wait a minute. And that’s when it really hit me that I had to do something.”

Shepard has made it her life’s mission to prevent people from suffering the same punishment she was given. She now serves as the executive director of the Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit dedicated to cannabis criminal justice reform.

“So far we’ve saved collectively 390 years of incarceration,” Shepard says. “I don’t harp on what could have been for me, but what could be for the people who are there now.”

Shepard can recount several individuals that the Last Prisoner Project has helped free from prison but the bigger stories are when the group is able to enact reform through state legislatures. The group helped pass a resentencing bill in Virginia, which is expected to grant relief to about 130,000 people serving time for cannabis offenses. When Maryland Governor Wes Moore cleared the records of roughly 145,000 people, he used the Last Prisoner Project’s pen to sign the legislation.

“Those are the moments that I step back and I go, ‘We are making a difference,’” Shepard says.