On a rainy morning in late October, an unassuming man walks around Penn's campus marveling at how much it has changed. Seeing the campus for the first time in 15 years, he only recognizes bits and pieces of it, and it takes him some time to reorient himself. His memories take him back to his student days. Walking down Locust Walk, he says he feels young, like he is 19 again. He approaches his old dorm and sees what used to be called Van Pelt College House is now Gregory. "I still have property here, I don't know if they just destroyed it," he says looking at the entrance. "I left all my stuff ... I went home for Christmas and then went to trial and I've never been back."
This stocky black man with a carefully-trimmed beard, small glasses and a quiet demeanor could easily pass for an alumnus returning to campus. But Christopher Clemente never got his degree from Wharton. Instead, he has spent the better part of the last 15 years in prison, most of it in maximum security in upstate New York.
Christopher Clemente's saga has a starting date -- the night of January 9, 1990, when he found himself waiting for his older brother, who had just gotten out of the hospital from a gunshot wound. Clemente had spent many weekends that semester going back to Harlem. That's where he grew up, and, he says, the place in those years had an almost magnetic pull on him. Now, after spending his winter break there, he found himself in his brother's apartment on 112th Street near St. Nicholas Avenue, planning to catch the late-night Amtrak train back to Philadelphia for his spring semester at Penn.
He was sitting on the bed, talking to his brother's then-girlfriend, Leah Bundy, and suddenly heard a hard knock on the door and then an exchange:
Who is it?
It's the police, open the fucking door.
Is there a problem?
Yeah, there's a problem. Open the fucking door.
"And that's when everything went haywire," he remembers. After entering the apartment, the police found 214 vials of crack and a loaded MAC-11 machine gun, with an additional 2,000 vials and a loaded 9mm pistol reportedly thrown out of the window.
Why the police were at the apartment is disputed to this day. At the trial, the police officers claimed they were responding to a 911 call that reported gunshots in the building, though Clemente suspects it was really a set-up aimed at his brother, a heavy drug dealer at the time. That night, after the police raid, he found himself in New York's notorious Riker's Island prison complex, which sits on the East River between Queens and the Bronx, charged with 12 counts of drug and gun possession.
He would spend the next 11 weeks behind bars waiting for his $75,000 bail to be posted. During that time, he would be stabbed 16 times and wind up in critical condition, only to return to jail.
A.T. Miller, now the Coordinator of Multicultural Teaching and Learning at the University of Michigan, was then the Graduate Associate in Clemente's dorm. He remembers hearing the news as the college house was having dinner. "Our first reaction," he says, "was the police make these stupid mistakes and we will see Chris later this week."
Clemente remembers his own reaction as well. "I didn't really begin to think it would be that big of a deal until two detectives came to my cell when I was in holding-pen and had two newspapers, with me on the front page of both of them." One of them was the January 11, 1990 edition of The New York Post that ran the sensationalist front-page headline "Ivy League Crack Dealer" with Clemente's photograph right beside it. "That's when I was like, 'I'm going to jail for the rest of my life.' That got me nervous."
Soon thereafter, the New York media descended on Penn's campus to feast on the glamorous story that combined drug-dealing and the prestigious Ivy League. With the case in the public spotlight, the late William Kunstler, a famed civil rights lawyer, and his protege, Ronald Kuby, now a famous civil rights lawyer in his own right, took up Clemente's defense.
Miller recounts that journalists expected a flashy drug dealer and couldn't believe that Clemente was just a private, down-to-earth, hardworking student. No description could convince them of the possibility that Clemente might be innocent. Reacting to the negative coverage, the University suspended Clemente, deeming him a possible threat to campus order. That sparked protest on campus.
"There were big rallies because he had a lot of friends and because it was so clearly outrageous and way out of line," remembers Miller, who was a character witness at Clemente's trial. "It made him look guilty."
After a number of altercations and protests, the administration succumbed and reinstated Clemente. More importantly, Miller and other student leaders collected close to $20,000 from individual donations, without which Clemente's family would never have been able to post bail.
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To this day, Clemente vividly remembers the rampant drug culture in Harlem at that time. No one, he emphatically repeats, was more than one degree of separation from drugs in that environment. (In fact, he was arrested twice as a minor in drug-related incidents). But, he says, the drugs and guns in that apartment simply weren't his. They were his older brother's, Henry Clemente's, as was the apartment itself. That is why, upon his arrest, he thought the prosecution's case wouldn't amount to much. There was a kind of happy-go-lucky logic, he remembers: since the drugs weren't his and the apartment wasn't his, he couldn't possibly be convicted.
For those who didn't believe Clemente's version, his friend, Bill Madison, offered another insight in a Daily Pennsylvanian column: "People on campus felt that if Chris was dealing drugs, shouldn't his friends have known about it? ... That's something that's relatively hard to keep away from close friends."
But, for the police, and, as it turned out for the jury, the truth was evident: no law-abiding citizen would have found himself in a room filled with $10,000-20,000 worth of crack and an arsenal of loaded guns. In January, 1991, he and co-defendant Leah Bundy were found guilty on nine counts of drug and weapon charges.
"It was a very, very bad political climate to be trying the case," Kuby remembers. "The crack epidemic was absolutely out of control in New York .... There was a tremendous seething anger in the city over what crack was doing .... There was very little forgiveness, very little mercy for somebody who was caught up with it, however inadvertently."
Under New York State's strict 1973 Rockefeller Drug Laws that were originally passed to fight the heroin epidemic, both Clemente and Bundy were sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 16 years. Clemente's clemency petitions were denied and it was only earlier this year, after the reform of the Rockefeller Laws, which had some of the harshest mandatory minimum sentences in the nation, that Clemente was released after more than 14 years behind bars.
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Earlier this October, when I first meet Clemente, he's in the midst of painting his new apartment in Harlem off 126th and Morningside Avenue. He moved into it at the end of the summer, only four months removed from jail, which he spent living at his father's house. His t-shirt and shorts are covered in paint and he is worrying that he will have to put on yet another layer of dark cranberry paint on his living room walls. The symbolism of the situation isn't lost on him. "New walls for a new life," he says.
It would be understandable for a man, who spent the formative years of his life in prison to be bitter at the system, at the government and at the society which unjustly put him there. To put what Clemente lost in perspective, one can look at Harold Ford, who was Clemente's friend at Penn. Ford is now a fifth-term congressman for Tennessee and is currently running for the Senate. For his part, Clemente doesn't even have a college degree to his name. (That's an aspiration for the immediate future).
But the simple fact of the matter is that Chris Clemente isn't bitter. Yes, he says, the punishment was undoubtedly excessive -- but he no longer points the finger or blames anyone else.
"People get bitter because they blame other people. One thing that I have done is blame myself [and] taken responsibility for my actions. No one is to blame except me for me being in the position that I'm in. I don't blame anyone: I don't blame the judge, I don't blame the DA, my brother, society. Granted it was a long road, but that's the price I had to pay for my own stupidity."
Part of the reason he's not angry is because he never allowed prison to demoralize or break him.
"In a way there was a monotony," he says of prison life. "But for me, it was only one stretch for a couple of months where I saw myself being unproductive and not learning and not growing. Other than that, everyday -- even if it was the same schedule -- it was something new .... I was never really complacent or idle."
Such statements fly in the face of the orthodox criticisms of the American penal system. But this is more about who Christopher Clemente managed to become than it is about the status of the United States prison system.
For his entire term, Clemente worked in the prison law library, helping other inmates with petitions and paperwork, all the while studying law. (He only somewhat jokingly says that he knows the law better than many practicing lawyers). A lot of his time was spent keeping abreast of the outside news (at points, he had subscriptions to various newspapers and magazines, including U.S. News and World Report and The New York Times) and, most importantly, sustaining the relationships with people through endless letter writing.
But perhaps the main reason, he says, that he managed to keep developing through his time in prison was his turn to God and transformation into a born-again Christian. He says it wasn't an overnight process, but in the first years in prison at Greenhaven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York, he joined the prison church. Later, after being transferred to Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, he would become the preacher of the congregation.
"The church [was] never stagnant," he says. "There's always some kind of discussion, especially if there are a controversy -- it's like a back and forth."
Maybe the faith he found is the reason he talks of himself back when he got arrested with a kind of critical detachment, as though that happened to a completely different person. Or, perhaps, it is because, as any person, he has matured from a juvenile, egocentric teenager to a 35-year-old man, even if that maturation process occurred within the prison system.
When asked about the most difficult part of prison life, he does not bring up his near fatal stabbing in Riker's island, or the other encounters he most likely had while on the inside.
"It's more emotional than anything, emotional and psychological .... Movies portray it as a physical thing, but it is all in here," he says touching his chest with the palm of his hand. What hurt him the most over the years was the fracture between him and his past life: fewer and fewer people wrote to him, and he became frustrated over not being able to be there for many of his friends and family. But over time, he says, he learned to deal with those frustrations and get over those pains.
One of those people was his mother, Barbara Conde.
"What I saw as the hardest thing for Chris was [for] me to see him in jail -- that was the worst thing that could have happened to him."
She remembers he always came out "clean, chipper and smiling" and wanted always to be there for her emotionally, even if he couldn't physically. There was a strange reversal of roles: it was her son in prison keeping her strong on the outside. In those moments, she says, she wanted to cry, seeing how strong her son could be.
Clemente holds a certain conviction about the ultimate fairness of a person's fate that comes with sincere religious faith, a certain "this is the way it was meant to be" philosophy. After all, being so close to the violent drug culture of Harlem, there is no certainty that he would be alive today. Had he not gone to prison, he could have ended up like some of his friends growing up, or like his older brother, Henry Clemente, who was murdered within a year of Christopher's sentencing.
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By the end of our first meeting Clemente is getting ready to head off for his night shift. When I ask him where he works, he chuckles and is surprised I don't already know. "I work in a drug rehab clinic," he says with a kind of theatrical exasperation. "I think God put me there to humble me."
Being a correctional officer is a monotonous job that doesn't challenge Clemente. He's not planning to be one for long, but for now, it is something. He started working there only a couple of months after getting out of prison, and he knows that this experience is like learning to walk again. "I am concentrating on ... getting my life together. That's a very big job, that's a tremendous job."
One would expect someone who has spent 15 years of his life in prison to be disoriented, overwhelmed or dispirited, but if nothing else, Clemente is determined.
At the end of one of our last phone conversations, he expresses interest in finding out what his legal status at Penn would be. It's more than just curiosity, he says. He would love to come back to finish his degree, even if it's 15 years later than expected. "If they gave me a chance," he stutters, his voice growing with excitement, "I would actually move immediately and jump on the opportunity. I would go back in a heartbeat .... I would like to know what my status is. What is the school's position on me returning"
