Former felon at the White House.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - J.D. Stier - Biography

J. D. Stier is one of the most upbeat people I've ever met. A star organizer on the Obama campaign, he was recently tapped to work for the White House. You'd never guess that when his peers were going off to college, Stier was headed off to serve a couple of years in prison.

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As a teenager growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, Stier started landing in trouble. His mother had been hospitalized for mental illness and his parents divorced. Angry, alienated, and confused, he started getting stoned during the day in high school.

Then, at age eighteen, he was arrested for possession with intent to deliver marijuana.

"I kept getting in deeper and deeper," Stier says. "It's scary how quick it happens. It wasn't that big a step to get into buying a big quantity."

Stier was arrested again, at age nineteen, with seven and a half pounds of marijuana. He was sentenced to three and a half years in prison and shipped off to the Waupun Correctional Institution.

"I'd never been in a fight in my life," he recalls. "I was a 130-pound, twenty-year-old white kid. I grew up pretty colorblind. Now I'm living in an environment where the common thread is prejudice. There is such visceral, shocking racism."

White inmates called Stier "rug-lover" when he befriended a group of African American men. ("They kind of took me under their wing. They liked that I was this little pot dealer from Madison," he says.) He used humor to defuse tensions. And he began to feel, for the first time in his life, how privileged he was.

He had a full-time job at the prison library, and a father who paid for him to take correspondence courses at the University of Wisconsin.

But most significant, for Stier, was the relationship he maintained with an anthropology professor, Luke Matthews, whom he'd been taking a class with at Madison Area Technical College (MATC) before he was sent away.

Matthews remembers Stier coming to class perpetually stoned. "But even through that fog I could see there was something interesting about him," he remembers. "Then he suddenly disappeared."

Coincidentally, Matthews's wife was the prison's intake psychiatrist who interviewed Stier. "My wife came home one day and said, 'Do you know some kid named J. D. who took anthropology with you?' It seemed like he was going down the wrong path. The fact that he was arrested didn't surprise me," says Matthews. "The fact that he got sent up to a penitentiary--that surprised me."

Stier gets teary when he...