“His best years are being wasted in there. Fifteen to life is a death sentence, that’s what it is to Terrence. I don’t think he’ll last in there until 2008, I really don’t.”
—REGINA STEVENS, MOTHER (RECORDED IN 1999)
For this last chapter, I’m going to take you back to the beginning. Back to the story that inspired my career in news, the story that kept me up at night as I researched and reported it for close to six months. Back to the story that illustrated such injustice that it pushed me to view future news events through a more critical and skeptical lens. Back to the story that was supposed to help me earn my master’s degree at Columbia, but almost got me kicked out.
“Hide the tape!” I hissed. “Get it out of the camera and hide it.”
“I’m trying,” my documentary partner, Kelly Reardon, said through a clenched jaw. Her hands were trembling. The red-and-blue flashing police lights illuminated the inside of the car.
“We can’t lose that footage,” I said. “We need it. They can’t take the tape.”
It was too late. The officer was already at the passenger side window. Our Columbia Journalism School–issued camera was sitting on Kelly’s lap in full view. We had been pulled over on a side street near Green Haven, a maximum security men’s prison in the bucolic hamlet of Stormville, an hour north of Manhattan. Kelly rolled down the window, defeated.
“We saw you taking video of the prison from the parking lot,” the officer said.
We denied it.
“We know you were just visiting two of the inmates,” he said.
We said they were our friends.
“You’re going to have to follow me,” he commanded. I drove my car back into the prison parking lot. The New York State Police were already on their way.
Chris Clemente wrote Kelly and me a letter that night from his prison cell, dated February 29, 2000:
A funny thing happened to me a little while ago. For the first time since I was arrested 10 years ago, while I lay on my bed reflecting on the visit and sleeping, two C.O.’s [corrections officers] came in and did a special cell search. Obviously this is no ordinary cell search … the C.O.s tear apart your room looking for some kind of specific contraband. I’m still wondering why it transpired. I’m not in a gang, do not deal or use drugs, am not involved with any shady characters, nor am I a ‘revolutionary’ … I hope I haven’t gotten into any trouble unawares. I’ll definitely be praying about this and asking God to see me through.
Chris didn’t need to turn to a higher power for an explanation. It was all my fault. I was the reason for the frightening and invasive cell search. While trying to tell his story, I had unintentionally put Chris Clemente—former Ivy League undergraduate turned Inmate #91-A-1577—in harm’s way. By trying to highlight the injustice of the mandatory minimum sentence he was serving under New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, I had naively exposed Chris to disciplinary action. It’s been more than two decades since I received his letter and I still feel as though I’ve been punched in the stomach every time I read it. How could I have made things even worse for him? The unfortunate combination of my hubris and my inexperience had put Chris in jeopardy.
As we walked back into Green Haven Correctional Facility for the second time on that mild February day, Kelly and I debated calling her father, a prominent Connecticut attorney. Instead, we called our Columbia Journalism School faculty advisors. The school confirmed for the prison authorities that yes, the pair of twenty-two-year-old women who had been busted filming a state prison were graduate students at the school who were making a documentary about people sentenced under the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Yes, we were the same people who had requested an on-camera interview inside the prison with two inmates and were denied by the New York State Corrections Department in part because they thought we had a “biased selection of subjects.” Yes, we were the same people who had showed up unannounced at the State Capitol in Albany a month earlier to ask the Corrections Department research director what we could do to have the decision reversed. Yes, I was the same Ms. Maxfield who the research director claimed “began questioning my political affiliations, which had nothing to do with the disapproval of her research request,” before he kicked us out of his office. Guilty as charged.
The corrections officers and state police were eventually convinced that Kelly and I were not trying to break two men out of a maximum security prison. We had not provided them with any contraband to help them escape, though officers would later search their cells looking for it anyway. Out in the parking lot on that Leap Day afternoon, we were two rookie reporters who needed some video for our master’s project documentary. We were two passionate young journalists who wanted to meet the men we were writing about faceto-face, even if we weren’t allowed to videotape our conversations. The officers let us leave Green Haven, and the same research director who had kicked us out of his Albany office eventually wrote to our associate dean that we were no longer permitted in their facilities and insinuated that future Columbia Journalism students might also be subject to limited access to New York State prisons.
Other than some stern conversations with our professors, we faced no significant consequence for our transgression. We were never arrested. We were never charged. I wish the same could be said for the two men we were there to visit.
I strolled down the pedestrian walkway in Washington Heights, scanning the café tables for him. Newly minted class of ’21 graduates brushed past me in their academic regalia. Doctors and nurses in hospital scrubs were out enjoying lunch in the May sunshine. And then I saw him, standing and waving at me from a table next to the bookstore. A fifty-year-old man in a pinstriped suit and gold tie. His university ID on a lanyard around his neck. His daily workouts at the gym evident even in business clothes.
“Chris!” I called out. As I approached his table, he came out from behind it to give me a big hug.
“Look at you, Jen, all grown up,” Chris said, laughing.
“You look pretty different from last time I saw you too,” I responded, smiling.
Less than three miles from where we were sitting on that gorgeous spring day more than three decades ago, Chris Clemente was home on winter break from his sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). He was a student at the prestigious Wharton School of Business, where he was studying finance. Both of his parents had attended college, but Chris was the first person in his family to earn a coveted spot in the Ivy League.
Throughout his first semester sophomore year, Chris says he was distracted. He frequently spent weekends back at home in Harlem, taking the Amtrak train late Thursday afternoon from Philadelphia and spending the weekend with his brother Henry and his friends before heading back for classes Monday morning. His grades were slipping and the nineteen-year-old felt his concentration waning. His report card in December of 1989 was the first in his life that wasn’t all As.
The night of January 9, 1990, Chris was in his brother’s apartment on West 112th Street in Manhattan with his brother’s girlfriend, Leah Bundy. They were waiting for Henry, who had recently returned home from the hospital after surviving a shooting. Chris says his older brother was his best friend, a charismatic leader who could be caring one minute and conniving the next. Chris says his brother was a drug dealer and represented the life Chris tried to leave behind when he walked through the iron gates at Penn.
The police knocked before they barged in. Prosecutors would later say there was time for two thousand vials of crack and a loaded handgun to be thrown out the window into the courtyard below. But not enough time to get rid of the 214 vials of crack and a loaded machine gun that police found in the apartment. The NYPD also said they found a drug ledger with Chris’s name on it, a bulletproof vest, and $11,000 in cash.1 Leah and Chris were arrested, and he was charged with twelve counts of gun and drug possession. The New York Post headline screamed “Ivy League Crack Dealer” with his photo blasted on the front page.2
“The guns and drugs didn’t belong to me and it wasn’t my apartment,” Chris says. “I thought that would be enough to get me out of trouble.”
Chris was wrong. He spent eleven weeks at Rikers Island waiting for his family to post the $75,000 bail. He was stabbed while inside the notorious jail and hospitalized in critical condition. He was finally released with the help of close to $20,000 that student leaders at Penn collected on his behalf. After Penn administrators suspended him for four weeks for “threatening campus order,” protests erupted on campus.3 He wound up missing the entire spring 1990 semester.
Civil rights defense attorney of “Chicago 7” fame William Kunstler and his young associate Ron Kuby took Chris’s case shortly after he was arrested and promised a vigorous defense. Chris says he was offered a deal: one to three years in prison to plead guilty. He says he was following the advice of his lawyers when he turned it down. Kuby remembers Chris was concerned that he wouldn’t be allowed to return to Penn if he took the plea.
“We believed it was a triable case that we could win,” Kuby says. “I’m not sure Chris understood the full ramifications. And Bill [Kunstler] didn’t push people to take pleas if they didn’t want to.”
While out on bail, Chris returned to Penn in the fall of his junior year. He tried to put the reality of his impending trial in the back of his mind and focus on his academics. Since he was no longer leaving campus to go to New York City every weekend, his grades improved. He went to trial in late 1990 and the jury verdict came down on January 16, 1991. Guilty. Under the Rockefeller Drug Laws, Chris was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after sixteen years.
Leah Bundy was also sentenced under the Rockefeller Drug Laws to fifteen years to life and was separated from her young daughter. A year after she and Chris went to prison, Henry Clemente Jr., the owner of the apartment, the drugs, and the guns, was murdered. Chris was not permitted to leave prison to attend his brother’s funeral.
Chris was always a voracious reader, and while at Green Haven, he would receive books from friends to help him pass the time. Giving away most of the donated books ingratiated him to his fellow inmates, but Chris held on to the finance and accounting textbooks and read them like novels. He worked in the law library, helping other inmates research their cases and possible avenues for appeal. He turned to God, becoming a born-again Christian and eventually leading Bible study groups and Sunday services behind bars. And he answered dozens of letters, including one from a group of three aspiring reporters and Columbia journalism students who wanted to make a documentary about his case and the harsh sentence he received under New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws.
In the fall of 1999, Kelly Reardon, Marysol Castro, and I had been reporting on Rockefeller Drug Law protests in New York City, and we had learned about Chris after being introduced to his father. Henry Clemente Sr. was one of a dedicated group of family members committed to freeing their children. They partnered with prison reform advocates who had been lobbying lawmakers for years, appealing to them to overturn the laws that mandated unduly long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Chris’s dad suggested we write to his son at Green Haven if we wanted to feature his case in our documentary, Fifteen to Life. I was shocked and intrigued by Chris’s story: how had an Ivy League undergrad, someone on the same academic path as mine, wound up in state prison for more than a decade?
In his first correspondence back to us on December 11, 1999, Chris taught me a humbling lesson about respect for the people I cover on the news. Not everyone is racing to have their life story featured on television, even if it is for the lofty purpose of exposing a controversial law. “Your ‘intrusiveness’ into my private life without my permission is kind of offensive to me,” Chris wrote. “You could never understand how I feel … for the last nine years I’ve been living in a fishbowl,” he continued. “I cherish the tiny amount of privacy I still have and only share ‘me’ with people that I know and have become comfortable with.”
He was right. We had extracted information from his father and other people involved in his case without being sensitive to Chris’s wishes or even waiting for his consent.
By his next letter, Chris agreed to participate in our project but noted that the truth was complicated. He wrote back on December 22, 1999:
If you are attacking the severity and inequality of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, then I’m for it. But if you are expecting some unspotted, crystal clean angel then I don’t perfectly fit the build … had I known then what I know about the law now, I would have most certainly pled guilty.
After chiding us for invading his privacy, he also conceded that “there aren’t too many people who sincerely want to fight injustice where they are not directly affected by it.”
As the documentary took shape that winter, Chris started asking Kelly, Marysol, and me more detailed questions about our classes at Columbia and what our professors were teaching us. In a letter from February 13, 2000, he shared with us students his own philosophy on journalism: “It is a subjective medium used to shape, mold, and create public opinion. At its best it can be used as a tool to help steer people in a direction of what is thought to be a common good. At its worst it is a propaganda machine used against the ‘masses’ to the advantage of small interest groups.” We corresponded with Chris for months and I found his letters fascinating, insightful, and sad. In the corner of each letter, he would list the start and end time of when he wrote them. “Start: 10:24 a.m. End: 11:18 a.m.” Sixteen years to life of counting the minutes.
Chris had a point by calling out the Fifteen to Life documentary as a form of “advocacy journalism.” Kelly, Marysol, and I zeroed in on the most egregious Rockefeller Drug Law cases and used them as examples for a larger systemic problem. One of the key sources for our project was a person named Jan Warren, who was unique in the New York prison system as a white woman. She had been sentenced under the Rockefeller Drug Laws to fifteen years to life in 1986 after serving as a drug courier for her boyfriend. Her first and only arrest was for having eight ounces of cocaine taped to her chest when she flew from Newark, New Jersey, to Rochester, New York.
Warren was ill-advised by her defense attorney and took her case to trial. She was found guilty and ended up serving more than a decade in prison away from her sixteen-year-old daughter. “It was darkness. I couldn’t see the end of it. It was too long, way too long,” Warren told us in 2000 from her Rochester home, less than a month after she was released.
We also learned of Jan’s story through the dozens of advocates we met while covering Rockefeller Drug Law protests. Using her on-camera interview, coupled with interviews with politicians from across the political spectrum, we explained the chances of reforming the laws and what it would take for politicians in Albany to overturn them. I don’t think we made a mistake by not giving equal time to the “other side,” the side that would have argued to keep the laws that had forced tens of thousands of people into unjustly harsh sentences. As journalism students, we didn’t think that both sides were morally equivalent and we didn’t think they deserved the same treatment. Especially after we heard the story of Terrence Stevens.
In February of 1990, Terrence Stevens took a trip on a Greyhound bus up to Buffalo, New York, to see his extended family. The 375-mile journey from Manhattan took most of the day and he intermittently dozed and stared out the window to pass the hours. When the bus arrived at the Buffalo terminal, Terrence waited on board for help while everyone else got off.
As we would later explain in our documentary, “Terrence can’t eat, brush his teeth, or even turn the page of a book without help.” He was born with muscular dystrophy, a degenerative condition that for him means he is essentially paralyzed from the neck down. More than three decades ago, as Terrence waited for the family friend he was traveling with to retrieve his wheelchair from the bay under the bus, he heard a commotion at the front of the vehicle.
Terrence remembers the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officers boarded the bus and started walking back in his direction. Don’t move, they said, not realizing that “don’t move” was the reality of Terrence’s entire life. They picked up the duffel bag lying on the seat across the aisle from Terrence. It had another man’s name tag on it. It was packed with another man’s belongings.
They unzipped the bag. It had 5.5 ounces of cocaine inside.
Terrence tried to explain. That’s my buddy’s bag, he said. They’re not my drugs.
With great difficulty, twenty-three-year-old Terrence was taken into police custody. He remembers it took two DEA agents to carry him off the bus. They placed him in his wheelchair and pushed him into the interrogation room, where he says he told them over and over again, I don’t have any information. They’re not my drugs.
Terrence was charged with cocaine possession and conspiracy. He says he was offered a plea deal for three years of probation in exchange for being an informant. Terrence insisted he had no information to provide and no links to any drug network. He took his case to trial, assuming the truth would set him free. He had no criminal record. He said countless times the drugs weren’t his.
Still, Terrence was found guilty. Under New York State’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, Judge John Rogowski had no choice but to sentence Terrence Stevens to fifteen years to life in state prison. The judge later expressed his regret in an interview, saying, “It’s a sad commentary that the law doesn’t permit for the proper relief that should be given a human being.”4
The friend he was traveling with, the one whose name was on the bag tag? He testified against Terrence and got five years of probation. Terrence says his former friend got off easy after giving the prosecutors information on other drug dealers.
Terrence’s mother, Regina Stevens, was devastated. For years, she had resisted putting her son in an assisted living facility as some doctors had suggested, once he got too big for her to pick up. No, she said. I will care for my child at home. He’s my son.
As she heard the judge sentence Terrence to fifteen years, it was as though Regina’s mind was transported, as though the words echoing off the courtroom walls were some sort of dream.
“My son is innocent; he is definitely innocent. He has no business in there,” Regina told us in 1999. She had been repeating the same phrase for almost a decade at that point, to prison authorities, to defense attorneys, at protest rallies, to anyone who would listen. I met Regina Stevens at one of those demonstrations, where she and Chris’s father, Henry, frequently appeared together to argue on behalf of their sons. They never gave up on their children, ensuring no one would forget about them even as they were locked away. They never gave up demanding justice.
Just like Chris, Terrence would serve his sentence at Green Haven, where he was enrolled in the “Total Care” program. He was the only prisoner in New York State with muscular dystrophy, and he needed constant medical supervision and care. To illustrate how much effort it took to keep Terrence imprisoned, consider just one of his medical needs: to be turned every two hours while he was sleeping to prevent respiratory issues. One of the inmates who worked overnight in the laundry was assigned the task. Every night, Terrence remembers a corrections officer would escort the laundry worker to his cell. Unlock the cell. The worker would carefully turn Terrence and support him with pillows. The corrections officer would then lock the cell and escort the worker back to the laundry. Terrence recalls they would repeat the entire routine again two hours later. And two hours after that. One advocacy group estimated the total cost to taxpayers to incarcerate Terrence was $450,000.5
“It was a nightmare,” Terrence summed it up. “The system is not set up for someone who poses no physical threat to society. The prison was not built for someone like me.”
During his years at Green Haven, Terrence developed a reputation as an advocate for other prisoners with disabilities. Some prison hallways were too narrow for wheelchairs. The prison yard was riddled with potholes. He collected complaints and met with the superintendent once a month to try to make his existence in prison slightly less bleak.
About halfway through his sentence, in one particularly humiliating experience, Terrence remembers he was written up by a corrections officer for refusing an order to drop his pants for a strip search after a visit from his family. Refusing? Terrence hadn’t been able to dress or undress himself in decades. Despite his protests, he says he got forty days in solitary confinement.6
By the time I first heard Terrence’s story from his mother, Regina, in 1999, he had already been behind bars for six years. I had just started studying for my master’s degree at Columbia Journalism School and had teamed up with Marysol and Kelly to produce a documentary for our master’s project. We had debated several potential topics, but there was one theme to which I kept returning. As a political science major as an undergraduate at Columbia, I was always fascinated by laws that had unintended consequences. Laws that may have been passed to solve one problem but wound up creating entirely new ones.
The Rockefeller Drug Laws certainly fit the bill. Passed in 1973 and signed by then governor Nelson Rockefeller, the New York State law was designed to enact stiffer penalties for drug dealers and users. Back in the early 1970s, the argument was that if you just threatened people with enough time, they would stop dealing and using drugs. The laws provided little to no discretion for judges—if the person was convicted, the draconian sentence had to be handed down, even for first-time nonviolent offenders like Terrence.
“At Green Haven, I met people who were serving time for rape, for molesting children. They were all serving less time than I was,” Terrence remembers.
“The only crime that mandates harsher sentences,” I intoned in Fifteen to Life, “is murder.”
Case in point: Eric Parsons. Back in chapter 5, I wrote about how Parsons was convicted of intentionally setting the house fire that killed his wife and four young children. Parsons was sentenced to serve his time at Green Haven, under the same rules and regulations as Terrence. A man who couldn’t brush his own teeth was imprisoned in the same maximum security facility that would later house a man who single-handedly murdered his entire family.
By the late 1990s, the number of drug offenders in New York State prisons had multiplied by five times since the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed, up to 23,000 people.7 The number of prisons built to house them had quadrupled, and the Department of Corrections was the largest employer in six Upstate New York counties. Incarcerating people was big business, and the impact was felt deeply in certain communities.
“The law disproportionately affects people of color,” we wrote in 2000. “While more than half of drug users are white, 94 percent of drug prisoners are black and Latino.”
By 1999, when we started our research, we discovered that even some of the Republican lawmakers who crafted the bill in the 1970s had concluded that their “War on Drugs” was a failure. We sat down in Albany with State Senator John Dunne, the former chair of the Prisons Committee.
“So it was out of a sense of frustration, the greater the punishment, the greater the deterrence to criminal activity,” Dunne said, explaining the thinking behind the laws.
“Do you think the laws have accomplished those aims?” I asked.
“No, not at all,” Dunne answered.
We questioned why, after twenty-seven years, there wasn’t more momentum to overturn the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Advocates had been warning of their negative effects on families and communities for years. Republican governor George Pataki had begun granting clemency for a few drug inmates every Christmas, but the gesture only covered 0.06 percent of the people eligible.
Republican state senator Guy Velella granted us an interview and offered up this honest assessment: “Everyone is worried about being labeled soft on crime. Not one member of the legislature wants to stand up and say, ‘I’m soft on crime and I want people who do bad things to walk freely among us.’ If you said Guy Velella was for weakening drug laws, Guy Velella would be thrown out of office. People are cautious about how this is packaged.”
Thrown out of office? Not a single incumbent New York legislator lost an election in 1998.
A few days before Christmas in 2000, the superintendent of Green Haven handed Terrence a letter and helped him open it. Nine years and seven months, Terrence read.
That’s your sentence, the superintendent said. You’re going home.
Terrence was the one in 1,500 inmates who had been granted clemency and an early release by Governor Pataki. The prison nurses, corrections officers, the Green Haven superintendent, and even the judge who sentenced Terrence all wrote letters supporting his bid for clemency. On January 31, 2001, his family was waiting for him at the prison gate in a Lincoln Navigator stretch limousine. On the ride back to his mother’s apartment at the Wagner Houses in East Harlem, they played rap music and toasted Terrence with champagne. He was safe again.
Adjusting to life on the outside was a challenge. Physically, Terrence was much improved being back in his mother’s care. But mentally, he was suffering. For almost a decade, his experience with the outside world was in an enclosed prison yard. Large spaces frightened him. Everything seemed wide open, and the world moved so fast that it was hard to keep up. Little things like the phone ringing or opening the refrigerator were overwhelming. It took more than six months for him to feel comfortable outside the family’s apartment. He is still terrified of the subway.
Within a year of being released, Terrence started the Within Arms Reach organization, dedicated to helping children whose parents are behind bars. The group raises money to pay for children to visit their parents in prison. New York is a large state, and people can be incarcerated up to an eight-hour drive away from where their families live, a journey that requires bus tickets and hotel rooms that may be prohibitively expensive without outside help. Terrence forged a relationship with the City University of New York, enlisting medical students to volunteer their time to give hands-on lessons in science and technology to the children of inmates. “It has a big impact on the med school students,” Terrence tells me. “They get a break from the books and they get so much joy from working with the kids.”
Terrence is in his fifties now and he struggles with mobility. It is a race against time—as the medications to treat his muscular dystrophy improve, he is aging and getting weaker. When I met up with him for breakfast one morning in Edgewater, New Jersey, he made his left hand into a fist to show me how it is getting stronger. He still needed his uncle’s help to raise the glass of orange juice up so he could sip it from a straw.
Terrence’s eyes lit up when he revealed that he has a new business venture, one he has dreams of launching in his home neighborhood of East Harlem. He has applied for a license to sell recreational marijuana in New York. He has heard about how it has helped people with a variety of ailments, and he wants to be part of the legalization. What an astonishing example of how much things have changed in the last three decades: a man sentenced under unduly harsh drug laws, a man who served close to a decade in prison, is now applying to legally sell marijuana and pay taxes back to the same system that locked him away.
“It’s amazing how the world changes,” Terrence remarks. “I’m just happy to be alive.”
Long after Terrence was back home, Chris Clemente was still behind bars. In 2004 and 2005, the Rockefeller Drug Laws were amended to allow him and his lawyers to file a motion to shorten his lengthy sentence. Sitting in the same courtroom in front of the same judge who had sentenced Chris in 1991, defense attorney Ron Kuby told the court that he had made “one of the biggest mistakes of [his] career” by taking the case to trial and not counseling Chris to take the plea deal.8 Kuby says Chris’s case is still the cautionary tale for all his young clients. “Deciding whether to take a plea or take a case to trial—I’m trying hard to mitigate damage. I’m terrified of these monster sentences,” Kuby recalls.
Judge Richard Lowe, who had corresponded with Chris through letters while he was in prison, agreed that Chris had served enough time and pointed out that the Rockefeller Drug Laws made it impossible for him to have discretion to allow a lesser sentence earlier.
Chris was released on March 31, 2005. As he describes it, he hit the ground running. He was hired as a university test proctor within two weeks of returning home, got a job at a drug rehab center, and worked as a bouncer at a sports bar in Queens on the weekends. Examining his paychecks a few months after he was released, he was convinced the government was withholding too much money for his taxes. When he saw a sign for free tax classes a year later, he signed up and soon started working at Jackson Hewitt preparing tax returns. He had gone back to his roots as a “money guy,” the same natural ability that led him to Wharton’s finance program almost two decades earlier.
“I feel happy when I help someone with their tax returns,” Chris explained to me recently. “I have strong bonds with my clients and I feel a sense of accomplishment when I help them organize their finances.”
Chris considered going back to Penn, but the cost of attending the prestigious institution was insurmountable, even with financial aid. He enrolled in Baruch College in Manhattan, first earning his undergraduate degree in accounting and then a master’s in taxation. He continued to work while attending classes. He had his own apartment. It seemed like everything was going well, and by his own account, he faced few adjustment issues despite his fourteen years as an inmate. But as Chris tells it, the worst was yet to come.
At first, it seemed too good to be true—free MetroCards. Commuters in New York City use the plastic cards to swipe through turnstile gates to ride the subway and to pay the fare on city buses. A friend of Chris’s had surreptitiously discovered a glitch in one of the automated machines that sold and dispensed MetroCards in Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan. By using a debit card from a faraway bank, she found she could “buy” MetroCards without ever being charged. By the time the MTA discovered the ruse through a routine audit and subsequent surveillance video, the scam had reportedly cost the transit agency $800,000. Chris was arrested and charged with grand larceny, accused of selling the ill-gotten MetroCards and pocketing the profits.9
This time, he wasn’t taking his case to trial. “It was worse than the first arrest because then I was only nineteen,” he remembers. “This time, I was devastated, so disappointed in myself. I had tried to restart my life, but I had faltered again. I thought I was better off dead.”
When Chris told me about his second arrest, he was surprised that I hadn’t already heard about it. When I googled “Chris Clemente MetroCard,” just a few newspaper articles from August of 2008 came up, and I knew I hadn’t covered his arrest for Eyewitness News. It seems that Chris’s financial transgression was far less interesting to us in the local media than his drug and weapons offenses had been eighteen years earlier. Following his arrest in 1990, Chris was national news. The unlikely confluence of an Ivy League finance student and New York City’s crack epidemic catapulted his case to the cover of tabloid newspapers and the lead of local newscasts. As a young Black man, Chris says he felt he had let himself, his family, and his community down. And now it had happened again.
On July 1, 2010, Chris pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, served eight months on Rikers Island, and agreed to pay back $5,000. He says of all the years he spent in prison, those 240 days were the worst. He was released in February of 2011 and vowed to never go back again.
Chris kept that promise. He is working two jobs now: one at a large university medical center, managing the finances for a nonprofit that supports children with cancer and their families. He organizes fundraising events, helps families with sick children with their medical, rent, and utility bills, and ensures that the organization is running smoothly. On nights and weekends, Chris manages his own accounting firm. He helps people with their tax returns and guides them through the paperwork to start new businesses. The same person who devoured accounting textbooks behind bars is translating that knowledge to his own success three decades later. In May of 2021, after a series of four tests and multiple interviews to explain his former felony convictions, he was officially licensed as a certified public accountant. He signs his audits and tax returns with pride: Christopher Clemente, CPA.
Chris credits his faith in God for being a guiding and stabilizing presence in his life. He and his wife, Vevzaida, are both deacons at the Manhattan Grace Tabernacle Church. Giving testimony about his own life’s challenges, Chris leads the Celebrate Recovery ministry. The twelve-step Christian self-help program is designed to support people in overcoming their addictions through a strong faith in God. He even goes to Rikers Island to minister both to people who are imprisoned and the corrections officers. Back to the same place where he was jailed twice, stabbed, and critically injured. “I hear the heavy metal doors close behind me and I’m not scared,” Chris recently told me. “I know I’m in there to do the Lord’s work.”
Chris tells people who are struggling that he remembers being a ten-year-old boy watching his stepfather sell heroin out of the family’s apartment. He knew he didn’t want to grow up to be like the addicts who came to buy the drugs. But as much as he tried to be a “school kid” and focus on his grades, he couldn’t ignore the reality of what was happening around him, the financial success and enviable status that the drug dealers in his own family achieved. “This is a spiritual struggle,” Chris says. “And I pray every day for the help of the Holy Spirit.”10
Chris told me a story about a contractor who once came to his house in Westchester County to check on a gas line. The person walked though his picturesque suburban home and yard and said admiringly, “You are living the American Dream.” Chris thanked him and responded, “I also lived the American nightmare.”
In April of 2009, Governor David Paterson signed legislation effectively overturning the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Earlier that year, New York’s first Black governor had signaled in his first State of the State address that he was in favor of major reform. “I can’t think of a criminal justice strategy that has been more unsuccessful than the Rockefeller Drug Laws,” Paterson said.11 Under the new system, the mandatory minimum sentences were eliminated. Discretion was returned to judges, who could consider a wide range of factors before deciding on a sentence for someone convicted of a drug offense. Drug treatment options expanded, and the system allowed more people to appeal their unfairly long sentences.
A Vera Institute of Justice study released six years after the reforms passed found a 35 percent increase in people going to drug treatment after being arrested for drug crimes. The people who went to treatment were less likely to be arrested again, compared to people who had gone to prison for drug offenses.12 In the ten years after the Rockefeller Drug Laws were overturned, the prison population in New York State dropped by 21 percent.13
And then the biggest reversal of all: in 2020, New York became the sixteenth state in the country to legalize marijuana for recreational use.
Chris and Terrence both commented to me that they had watched me over the years on the New York City news and recalled that they were at the center of my first major assignment. Terrence even said that he would tell people, “That’s my friend! She came to visit me when I was behind the wall. I need to go find her one day.”
Both Chris and Terrence remembered the invasive cell searches they endured after my visit. I apologized profusely and explained that we never dreamed our actions would put them in harm’s way. Back in 2000, I was earnest and curious, but still clearly had a lot to learn as a journalist. As much as I wanted to tell their stories, I wasn’t mature or experienced enough to comprehend how my actions would ricochet on Chris and Terrence.
Looking back at the Fifteen to Life documentary that Kelly, Marysol, and I produced, I am struck by how many people agreed to meet with us and share their stories—families, advocates, lawmakers, and the inmates themselves. Despite our best efforts, our twenty-five-minute movie was never sold and was never screened outside of the Columbia Journalism School auditorium. And yet, dozens of people spent time with us and imparted their knowledge to further our education and to contribute to a wider understanding of these devastating laws.
I had a similar experience when I was twenty-one years old and Congressman John Lewis granted me an interview for my senior honors thesis at Columbia. He was interested in my research on how majority Black congressional districts in the South drawn after the 1990 census unintentionally helped white Republicans in neighboring districts get elected. In January of 1999, when I wrote Congressman Lewis a letter describing my work, I never imagined that one of the key figures of the civil rights movement would make time to sit down with a college senior with a lot of ideas but a thin resume.
Much to my surprise and delight, Congressman Lewis did invite me to meet him at his congressional office in Washington, DC. Walking into his office was like entering a museum—his photos and awards lined every wall and covered every surface. He spent more than half an hour with me, patiently answering my questions. He had absolutely nothing to gain, except to ensure a truthful and nuanced version of how he and other Black congresspeople from the South had risen to power, and how they intended to keep it in a changing electoral landscape. It was clearly important to him to pass along his wealth of knowledge to the next generation.
I am humbled by the time that Congressman Lewis and more than ten thousand other people I have interviewed over my career have spent with me. I am blessed with the privilege of telling their stories. The debt can never be repaid, but I have found great satisfaction in teaching at Columbia, in sharing my knowledge and experience with the next generation of reporters. Much of the wisdom I have gained over these last two decades has been through trial and error, mistakes and missteps, like that day in February of 2000 when I was busted trying to film the exterior of a prison after visiting Chris and Terrence inside.
As much as I have taught my Columbia Journalism students, they have also inspired me to take a more critical look at my own work. There was something about teaching the art of reporting, in addition to doing it every day, that made me consider more deeply my role in people’s lives—both while reporting the story itself and long after. Teaching has made me a better reporter because it has forced me to dissect how I source a story and to detail the individual parts that make up the whole. Watching students twenty years younger than I am approaching a breaking news event or a feature profile in a unique way prevents me from falling back into my own familiar patterns.
There’s one lecture that I now see in retrospect formed the first outline of this book. It’s called Broadcast Interviewing Techniques (clever, I know) and I usually cover it at week five. I counsel my students to consider all kinds of variables when they are starting an interview. Are you approaching someone fleeing a breaking news scene? Or did you call their publicist first and set up an interview in their office? Are you sticking the handheld microphone in their face in the hopes that they won’t push you away? Or did you gently clip the lavalier microphone to their lapel as you sat across from them in their living room? Does the person seem nervous or relaxed?
Before my students ask a single question, I am asking them to consider their environment and the person they are interviewing. I am asking them to show empathy for the interview subject by considering their perspective before trying to extract information. I am asking my students to be thoughtful in the way they cover the news. In the way they cover people. Human being first. Journalist second.
Because at the end of the day, we are telling people’s stories. We are there to bear witness, to listen, and to question. We are there to provide a healthy dose of skepticism, coupled with comfort and compassion. The information may flow through us, but we are not a neutral medium. The stories change us, for better or for worse. In my case, the thousands of stories I have covered have left me with a greater appreciation for life, a tendency to forgive myself and others for the mistakes we all make, and an overwhelming sense of respect and gratitude for the people who choose to spend time with me in service to the greater good.
“Being inside, behind the wall, you feel like you have been forgotten,” Terrence Stevens explains about his time in prison. “But knowing that people on the outside were writing about me and following my case gave me hope that change would come one day. And it has.”