Irvin Moore’s Grand Rising

The daily texts I get from Irvin Moore are like wake-up calls from a life coach. “Welcome to this Grand Rising,” they say. Each brings new, usually glad tidings to Irvin’s 165 texting partners. Almost all end on that same positive note.

Irvin Moore has a lot to be positive about these days. Last week, he got his first driver’s license – at the age of 75.

A week before that, he celebrated a much bigger milestone.

March 26: It’s the one-year anniversary of Fred’s and my return to this beautiful world. Tears of Joy!

That’s one year since he — accompanied by Fred, his St. Bernard — walked away from Rockview prison after 52 years behind bars. The anniversary put an official end to Moore’s status as a furloughed prisoner, which meant an end to his mandatory weekly overnights at a halfway house in Johnstown. 

The guys in Johnstown are going to miss him. Irvin never made the two-and-a-half-hour bus trip without groceries — a few hundred dollars’ worth.

His message after his final trip: I am happy. I am sad. Who will feed these men? Help them?

The deliveries — made possible, in part, by donations — were an expression of a broader philosophy: You will be blessed by being a blessing.

Irvin Moore has been blessed many times over since he gained his freedom. Penn State professors Laurie Mulvey and Sam Richards found him an apartment. Friends and family helped with the rent. Members of Our Lady of Victory Church gave him a car. And last December, he started a job with the Restorative Justice Initiative in Penn State’s College of Education.

Irvin attributes many of the blessings that have come his way to having Fred by his side. He was supposed to have spent the past year living in the halfway house full-time. But the place couldn’t accommodate Fred, and parting man and dog was out of the question, so he was allowed to move into his apartment after two months in the halfway house.

Then there are the chance meetings on the street and now, on campus. Fred is so big and so obviously sweet-natured that he pulls people into Irvin’s orbit. When passersby ask Irvin about him, they hear how he trained Fred as a service dog at Rockview and was allowed to keep him when the pandemic ended the training program.

And when they hear more of Irvin’s story, they want to help ease his transition back into the world, just as he is now helping other “reentrants” through his job at Penn State — a job, he writes, that I had been shaped, fashioned, hammered and beaten on the anvils of dread and dire circumstance to be ideally suited for. 

To review Irvin’s story (I wrote about him last October): When he was 22 years old, he killed his dealer in Philadelphia. His sentence: life. 

In prison, he heeded the advice of the “old heads” – men who had been in the joint long enough to have learned that their only hope of a pardon and a successful reentry was to be peacemakers, to take advantage of whatever training programs were offered, and to educate themselves. 

Thus, decade by decade, did Irvin Moore build a case for the commutation of his sentence. 

There is perhaps a tendency to see a guy like Irvin Moore as the great exception. Most inmates, we assume, are thugs, unfit for life beyond the razor-wire fences. Irvin committed an act of thuggery, but he was the rare bird who acquired the knowledge, the wisdom and the spiritual strength to deserve a second chance.

Irvin disputes this. “There are more good guys in there than there are bad,” he tells me. “My story is the story of the strengths that live within all of us.”

What needs to happen, he says, is for prison to become a place that taps into those strengths, preparing those who have broken the law to return to society as self-supporting, law-abiding, contributing citizens: restorative rather than retributive justice.

After my visit with Irvin on Sunday afternoon, he had an errand to run. The RJI had a couple of prospective students coming to town and he had been asked to meet their bus and drive them to the Penn Stater. He was as eager to get behind the wheel of his silver Ford as a newly licensed 16-year-old. But then, Irvin Moore does everything joyfully these days. The one sour note: 

April 11: My beloved big boy Fred may be leaving us soon. The pain of his cancer may be at that point. And I will have to let him go.

Irvin Moore’s hard, blessed life has prepared him for such a moment.

Jan. 22: When things don’t go as planned or desired I will try to…keep loving this Grand Rising and all it brings.