Six years is a cruelly long time to go with nothing to read except the Bible and Danielle Steel. But that’s exactly how long inmates at King County Correctional Facility have gone without essential reading materials—funding for the jail’s library was cut in 2007. These days, the inmates hang their hopes on a lonely book cart pushed around on no discernible schedule, but even the cart is fleeting and irregular: Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the book you want is there; more often, it isn’t. And if you do get your hands on a book, chances are good it will slip away. Books have a way of disappearing.
The Golf Pencil Group, named for the maddeningly dull pencils permitted in the jail, is a coalition of volunteer teachers and tutors who advocate for prisoners’ educational rights: the right to writing, reading, and learning materials; to creative and educational support; and, perhaps most importantly, the right to a few hours spent each week in the safe, forgiving space of a classroom. Last week, the group held a fundraiser at the Black Coffee Co-op on Capitol Hill to raise money for classroom books and other much-needed services. (Dictionaries. Dostoyevsky. Decent reading glasses.) Slam poet Michael Hood and local poet Jay Thompson have been teaching a creative-writing class at the jail for the past 18 months, and they read poems written by their students…