The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2007
Words from Within
Retired UA professor Richard Shelton has spent the past 30 years teaching writing to some of the most notorious inmates in Arizona’s prisons.
by Margaret Regan
photos by Jacob Chinn
More than 35 years ago, when Richard Shelton was a young assistant professor in the UA English department, he got a letter from Tucson’s most notorious murderer.
The man had a singular request. Would Shelton teach him to write poetry?
Charles Schmid had written from Death Row, at the Arizona state prison in Florence. He was serving a sentence of 50 years to life for the mid-1960s murder of a teenage girl in Tucson, but he was awaiting execution in the killings of two other girls.
Shelton knew all about the horrendous murders. Schmid had led a pack of hoodlums around town, and newspapers around the country had recounted his so-called “thrill killings” in lurid detail. They gave him a chilling name: the Pied Piper of Tucson.
But it seems the Pied Piper also was inclined toward poetry. Schmid had been in jail six or seven years already, and while he was waiting to die, he had begun to write. He had come across Shelton’s first book of poems, The Tattooed Desert, and he hoped the young professor would read and critique his own efforts. Shelton was intrigued.
“Here was my chance, I thought, to read the poetry of a monster,” Shelton recounts in his new book, Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer, published this fall by the UA Press. “Perhaps even to meet him. It was thrilling.”
So he agreed to take a look. But once Schmid’s poems arrived in the mail, Shelton was astonished to find that the work showed “remarkable talent. It was intense, often dark and brooding, but it had notable verbal energy and immediacy…”
Shelton began corresponding regularly with Schmid, insisting on rewrites, giving him the same kind of tough critiques he doled out to his university students. Eventually, he started driving the 70 miles to Florence to conduct the lit-crit sessions in person, under the nose of a burly guard in a visitors’ room painted a dispiriting shade of tan.
Soon more aspiring writers, alerted via the efficient prison grapevine, were sending Shelton their own missives from Death Row. Could he teach them to write too?
He could, and he did.
Out of these early exchanges grew Shelton’s acclaimed creative writing workshops, which he has now run in Arizona’s prisons for more than 30 years. Mustering all his skills to teach perhaps the most despised pool of students a professor could ever imagine, Shelton has taught murderers, rapists, and robbers, helping them to write poetry, plays, and fiction.
He’s even published their work in Walking Rain Review, a journal he founded for the purpose. Several of his former inmate students have become noted authors on the outside. Jimmy Santiago Baca has published a dozen books of poetry and fiction, and won any number of awards, from the Pushcart Prize to the American Book Award. Ken Lamberton has published four books and won the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. (This fall, Shelton and Lamberton are touring together to promote their new books. Lamberton’s Time of Grace is a prison memoir.)
Others came out of jail and became successful businessmen, or counselors. Some fell apart, went back to drugs, committed crimes. And some died in prison, as Schmid did, brutally, at the hands of fellow inmates. But before he was murdered, even Schmid published some of his poems.
The classes may have changed the lives of his incarcerated students, but they also changed Shelton’s. He came to believe that even “monsters” like Schmid have a shot at rehabilitation and redemption.
Teaching the prisoners “has led me to more pain than I could have imagined then, [but] it has also enriched and enlarged my life,” he writes. “It has led me through bloody tragedies and terrible disappointments to a better understanding of what it means to be human and even, sometimes, to triumph.”
Shelton and his wife, Lois, a former director of the UA Poetry Center, live in bohemian splendor in the foothills of the Tucson Mountains. They bought their desert acre years ago when land was still cheap. Their 60s-modern ranch lies at the end of a long dirt drive, thick with cacti and mesquites, just beyond a guesthouse used over the years by countless assistants and students.
The parents of one son, Brad, they’re still getting used to the idea of Shelton being retired from the UA. He taught for 47 years, from 1960 to 2007, rising from assistant professor to Regents’.
“I took early retirement at the age of 74,” Shelton jokes. “I never really wanted to retire very much. I was happy with what I was doing. I love dealing with the students … but you never know how your health is going to be. And I wanted to do some traveling.”
Still, he says, he doesn’t see how he can find the time for trips. He may have given up his full-time UA job, but he hasn’t given up his writing. His 10th book of poetry, The Last Person to Hear Your Voice, also was published this year, by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Nobody Rich or Famous, a memoir of his family life and childhood up to age 11, is ready to go off to a publisher.
This past spring, he was on the road promoting Going Back to Bisbee, the award-winning nonfiction book he wrote way back in 1992. Bisbee — “the most fun writing I’ve done” — is his memoir of landscape and culture in the far southeast corner of Arizona. The Arizona Humanities Council selected it for OneBookAZ, a program meant to get Arizonans of all stripes reading and discussing the same book at the same time. Shelton drove himself all over the state, to Yuma, Prescott, Sierra Vista, Phoenix — and back to Bisbee — to meet his reading public.
And he has no intention of giving up his unpaid half-time job teaching the prison classes.
“I’m running three workshops in the prison,” he says. “That’s like having a dairy farm. You can’t leave. I do have assistants, but I don’t want to be gone for extended periods of time. And I’m planning to expand it now that I’m retired, add a different workshop.”
At least he no longer has to make the long drive to Florence. Taught by a number of writers, the program still operates at seven or eight different prisons, but Shelton’s classes are in the state prison complex in Tucson. Though he’s been asked, he’s never taught federal inmates.
“They asked me to come to the federal, but the federal has all kinds of money, all kinds of programs, and the state has nothing. The state is strapped constantly. So I figured I should stay where I was most needed.”
To get to his stripped-down jailhouse classrooms, Shelton has to go through metal detectors and past sniffing dogs, ride a bus on the “inside,” pass through chain-link fences, gates, and locking doors, and into “no-man’s-land.” That foreboding place has a “chain link fence on both sides, razor-wire at the top, and a wire running down the middle. If that’s tripped it sends alarms.”
Still, Shelton feels perfectly safe in prison.
“I have 15 bodyguards with me at all times — my students,” he says.
In fact, one time, in the early days, when a riot broke out at Florence, Shelton’s students barricaded the classroom doors to protect him. The inmate-students have to compete to get into the classes — there’s always a long waiting list — so they tend to be the types who stay away from trouble.
“I work with the cream of the crop, basically. So they are not the group of inmates who would be rioting.”
Shelton is frequently asked how it is that so many of these convicts turn out to have literary talent. The answer is partly that he’s drawing from a large pool of potential writers (the Tucson unit houses more than 2000 prisoners) and partly that the long hours of confinement give the fledgling writers time to create.
“They don’t have as much time as people think because most of them work, but they do have more time than they would have on the outside,” Shelton says. “They don’t have the distractions, like where their next meal is coming from. They can concentrate.”
The flip side is that sometimes promising writers deteriorate when they get out.
“Life just eats them up. Some who survive after they get out continue to write do very well. But I’ve seen some really talented people who couldn’t keep it up.”
After more than three decades of witnessing prison operations firsthand, Shelton believes that America is dead-wrong in its approach to crime and punishment.
“I don’t believe in prisons,” he writes flatly in the book. “I don’t believe the American prison system as we know it should exist.”
Prisons have become increasingly brutal, he says, with earlier efforts at rehabilitation, however feeble, giving way to pure punishment.
Prisoners at Florence once upon a time could earn an associate’s degree through a community college. Prisoners in Tucson ran a commercial print shop that trained them in a remunerative trade. No more. Even musical instruments are banned. So is weightlifting equipment. Even Christmas boxes from prisoners’ families are now off limits. (“People lived for those food boxes from their families.”)
GED programs — the high school diploma equivalency program — mandated by law, remain.
“Over the course of the years it has been a taking away,” Shelton says. “I guess it started about 1985. The excuse the prison gives is, ’We are overcome with numbers. We don’t have staff. We don’t have time. We have to run a minimalist situation to get by.’”
But “minimalist” prisons with few programs “create criminals,” Shelton says, practically ensuring that inmates released without job skills quickly commit more crimes. Shelton argues that the state imprisons far more offenders than it should. Mentally ill prisoners — warehoused in state prisons on the cheap — make up 20 percent of the prison population, he says.
Another 50 percent “have never committed a violent crime. Many need drug rehabilitation and other things that they’re not getting, education, and so on. Many would be better off on house arrest wearing an ankle bracelet.”
In Shelton’s dream prison, those 70 percent of prisoners — the mentally ill, the nonviolent — wouldn’t be there. The remaining 30 percent, a much more manageable size, would be rehabbed and readied for work. And even if they were never released, they could lead better lives on the inside.
“The whole key to the prisons is to reduce the numbers,” he argues. “Then they would be capable of introducing programs … so they could make a living when they got on the outside. Many of them simply can’t cope.”
Ironically, while the prisons have become more punitive, the outside world’s attitude toward Shelton’s work has grown more accepting.
“When I first started with this, the (UA) dean was very unhappy with me,” Shelton remembers. Now, his creative writing workshops are officially an outreach program of the UA Poetry Center, and the UA last year gave him the Koffler Teaching Award in honor of his prison work. The Lannan Foundation funds a substantial portion of the work through a hefty grant. Colleagues routinely give Shelton books to take to the inmates.
“So that’s come full circle,” he says.
Shelton has never heard from the families of his students’ victims, but he unexpectedly developed a close relationship with one forgotten victim of Charles Schmid’s crimes: his broken-hearted mother, Katherine. In the book, Shelton recounts how he held her hand as she lay dying, years after her son’s death.
“I learned about the victims of crime from Katharine, how violent crimes always have many victims, and some of them often get little help or emotional support.”
Despite the horrific deeds some of his students have committed — and the many victims they’ve left in their wake — Shelton remains dedicated to their redemption. He writes in the book of being inspired by a sign he saw on a church in Tucson. It read: “You have no past here. Only a future.”
That’s how he treats the eager writers he sees lined up in the jailhouse desks. Treated with dignity and respect, the criminals often undergo a sea-change.
Schmid “was really maturing and changing,” Shelton says. This need to write came after he’d been in prison for six years. It doesn’t affect everybody that way. You have to have something when you go to prison, some sensitivity. And then it blossoms in prison, but not for everybody. There are thugs that just stay thugs, and others don’t. Others become very sensitive.”
The intensive workshops — and writing and publishing — are often the instrument of the prisoners’ conversion to a better life.
“They say, ‘For two hours, I’m free.’”
Go to related story, UA Poetry Center
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