Penitent Poets Learn Write From Wrong Writer Hopes Inmate’s Poetry Will Put Fear Of Death In Young Criminals

The nine teenage girls share a uniform: dark blue jump suits stenciled on the back with white block letters spelling “King County Youth Detention Center.”

Some sit perched on the backs of vinyl-covered chairs, others slouch with their arms crossed. They’re gathered outside their cells to talk about poetry.

“…As I grew older, my heart became colder

went from robbin’ and stealin’ to full-time dealin’

and about human life I had no feelin’

I was bound to fail going from jail to jail

in criminal activity you always leave a trail

At the end of the road there’s but one place to go

it’s the bowels of society and called death row…”

One of the girls is reading from a sampling of the 120 poems Tim Moxley, a Seattle writer, has collected from death row inmates across the country. The one above, called “To Row or Not to Row,” was written by a man convicted of two murders.

For eight months, Moxley has been going into the detention center once a week.

His message is in the poetry - interwoven with stories from his past and hard statistics. He volunteers his time to read the poems and talk with teenagers about what convicts have to say.

“Those lessons are lost when they are executed,” Moxley said of the inmate authors of his poetry collection. “I wanted to take something from the very end of that cycle of violence and plug it back into the beginning.”

The girls in juvenile detention are mostly 15 to 17 years old and constitute about 20 percent of the 200 inmates in detention at any given time. They’re in for armed robbery, drug dealing, murder. Many have been in before. Some are pregnant.

Moxley is a slender 34-year-old man with dark hair and a silver earring. As he gets to the more descriptive parts of his stories, he stresses phrases like “Blew off his head” and “hanging from his cell.”

The girls have a lot of questions: What made you start writing all these inmates in prison? What makes you think it’s going to keep us out of jail just telling us their stories? Do you think 50 percent of the people are going to change because of what you do? Do you think anyone is going to?

Moxley knows he’ll never reach anything like 50 percent of the teenagers he talks to, but he believes in the power of the written word. Bringing the poetry into the detention halls is worth it, he told the young women, “if even one of you read this poetry and decide, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.”’

Moxley’s readings are one of the volunteer programs the Department of Youth Services offers to the young people in their control and care.

“You just have to have a balance between punishment for the kids, but also providing opportunities for them to change,” said Bernie Warner, detention manager for the King County Department of Youth Services. “Ninety percent of the kids who are arrested end up returning to the community.”

Moxley has done readings at facilities around the Northwest, including one at the Donald E. Long School in Portland, a detention facility. The school held an assembly last spring when Moxley read the poems.

“It clicked,” said Cyndi Moody, the secretary at the school who facilitated Moxley’s presentation. “These kids are messaged and counseled to death, and sometimes the avenue that you least expect is the one that opens it up for a child. Like poetry.”

In his teenage years, Moxley qualified for the label “at-risk youth.” In a six-week period, he was arrested, thrown out of school and put on probation for smoking pot. It was his last time in jail.

He worked his way through school, earning his bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Oregon in 1992. He began soliciting the poems by sending letters to death row inmates in 1994. Some sent poems, others didn’t respond. One return letter read: “Stop pretending like you and your idealistic dream can make a difference.”

Eventually, Moxley hopes to publish the collection.

He asked the nine girls how many were in the detention center for the first time. One raised her hand. Another question: How many of you know somebody who’s in prison? Seven of the nine hands went up.

Moxley told them about a teenage friend who murdered the girlfriend of his drug dealer. The girl’s father was connected with the Mafia. A week after the friend turned himself in, he was found dead in his cell, his hands tied behind his back with duct tape and electrical cord around his neck.

“If you have friends in a penitentiary, you might want to rethink who you’re associating with,” Moxley told the girls. xxxx
DEATH ROW POETRY “…But unlike me you can look within - and end the nightmare before it begins. Truly life is yours to live but live it with love, peace, hopes and dreams. Understanding one thing, and this you’d better know God cannot be mocked; You will reap what you sow…” - from “House of Steel and Stone”