After 52 Years in Prison, He Wakes Up Smiling

Irvin Moore is living in his first apartment and working his first job. Someday, if he can save enough money, he hopes to buy his first car.

Irvin Moore is 75. At 22, he killed a man who sold him bad heroin. So at the age when he might have gotten that first job, apartment and car, he went to prison – and stayed there until last March: 26 years in Graterford, in Montgomery County, 26 years in Rockview, here in Centre County.

I met Moore – and Fred, his splendid St. Bernard — on Sunday at a forum on prison reform in Tudek Park. About 50 people – ex-cons, activists and friends and relations of people in prison — gathered to talk about overhauling a justice system that swallows people whole. Moore was the most impressive person there.

The next day, I visit him in his new apartment. He offers me coffee, just brewed, from beans he has ground himself — the first real coffee he’s ever had after a half-century of instant. Moore’s life is all about firsts just now:

“This is the first time I’ve ever paid rent, the first time I’ve paid taxes, the first time I’ve registered to vote, the first time I’m doing the things that a responsible grown man is supposed to do. The feeling is wonderful. Every morning, I wake up and I smile.”

He sits in an armchair, probably the first armchair he’s sat in since he was a kid. Fred sleeps twitchily at his feet. Man and dog met and bonded at Rockview. When, on the third try, Moore’s sentence was commuted, he got to take Fred out into the world with him.

Irvin Moore looks decades younger than 75. He speaks beautifully. When he was a kid, he stuttered.

“People used to laugh,” he says, “and in my neighborhood, you don’t get laughed at. So I fought a lot.”

And gained a reputation as a bad boy. Reform school followed. And then no school at all: He quit after 9^th grade. 

Around this time, heroin came to North Philly. 

“I got hooked and you have to satisfy the beast,” Moore says.

A dealer named Granville Sawyer sold him some bad dope. Moore went to get his money back. He pulled a gun. He and Sawyer tussled. The gun went off.

“I was praying he was all right,” Moore says. “When I heard he died, my heart just broke. I will be atoning for that for the rest of my life.”

He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life. At Graterford, he gravitated toward a group of inmates he refers to as “the old heads.” Joining them entailed an initiation rite: He had to read a book. He didn’t bother. Like so many guys in their early 20s, he already knew everything.

Next day, the old heads asked him what he thought about the book’s protagonist. He had no idea what a protagonist was.
“Don’t come back until you read the book,” one of the old heads said.

That night, he read from 8 until lights out at midnight, then found he could keep reading by a sliver of light. By morning he had finished Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” 

His takeaway: “Words themselves can save souls.”

So began the education of Irvin Moore. By the time of his transfer from Graterford to Rockview, he had 500 books in his cell. While in prison he earned his graduate equivalency degree, then two associate degrees. Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” sits on the coffee table. A Dostoevsky novel is on the bookshelf. 

I ask him what sort of life he might have had if he hadn’t made that one wrong turn.

No idea, he says. “I could have been a professor interviewing somebody in their apartment.”

Instead, he’s working nights at the Out of the Cold shelter in State College and hoping to get a job at Penn State. Right after I left him on Monday he got a call from the Restorative Justice Initiative in the College of Education, so he may be about to get his wish.

Meanwhile, he’s required to check in with a halfway house in Johnstown twice a week for a year. Each time he goes, he takes two suitcases full of food on the two-and-a-half-hour bus ride. The provisions are for the 30 or so ex-cons living in the house, part of his self-imposed mission to “be a blessing in the life of another person.”

Two bills having to do with prison reform are kicking around Harrisburg: 

• SB135, Life Without Parole Reform, would make prisoners convicted of second-degree murder eligible for parole after 20 years, and prisoners convicted of first-degree murder eligible for parole after 30 years.
• SB835, Medical and Geriatric Parole Reform, would extend parole eligibility to prisoners 55 and older who have served at least half of their minimum sentences or 25 years. 

When you think about these bills, think about Irvin Moore.

“I did things in my youth that were horrible,” he says. “But I’m 75 years old. I’m not that person.”