The dope dealer who got 55 years: even the judge called it cruel unusual and irrational.

• Author: Abramsky, Sasha
• Position: Weldon Angelos

Weldon Angelos has matching several-day-old stubble on his scalp and on his face. He has striking steel-blue eyes. He holds his body confidently, even aggressively, clad in prison-gray slacks and work shirt. The only visible sign of unease he betrays is the ceaseless intertwining of his fingers. He is twenty-five years old, a resident of the medium security federal penitentiary at Lompoc, California. He is slated to remain behind bars until 2059, when he will be seventy-eight.

Angelos works in the prison's dental lab and takes college classes--studying religion, philosophy, politics, anything to take his mind off the facts of his incarceration. He hasn't seen his two sons in the year-plus that he has been in prison. He's only seen his daughter a couple times. And he doesn't know if he'll ever set foot outside the penitentiary grounds again.

"Nothing could be worse than this," he acknowledges, hours into an interview in the prison's chilly visiting room, as we sit on blue plastic seats, a low-lying gray plastic table between us. "Even death offers a certain tranquility. I'm not talking about this prison. Just being locked up. Watching your kids grow up, your girl move on, that's the hardest part right there. I have nightmares I'm being killed, all the time. I'm being shot. I have nightmares something happens to my kids because I'm not there."

Angelos is not a murderer. Nor is he a rapist, an armed robber, or a kidnapper. If he were, chances are he'd be staring down a shorter sentence than the fifty-five years he's burdened with. No, he is a medium-scale Salt Lake City marijuana dealer who had no prior felony convictions.

His father, Jim, a Greek immigrant, himself served time in prison in Utah in the 1950s for stealing a Geiger counter. Jim was an eccentric, perennially aspiring country music singer, his mind full of a million plans that never materialized. The family bounced futilely between Nashville and Salt Lake for much of Weldon's early years.

When Weldon's mother walked out, Jim was left to raise his three children alone. They lived in dire poverty, their residences a series of apartments in Salt Lake's dilapidated public housing units. Weldon remembers standing in line for flee, government-issued cheese and powdered milk, and walking two miles to school in the snow because the family couldn't afford a car. Weldon's friends were members of gangs such as the notorious Vario Loco Town (VLT). In the housing projects, Bloods, Crips...