Gangsters' special weapon: poetry

"I felt like I'd sold my script down the river," he says as we exit the Pacific Coast Highway and climb the mountains of Malibu on our way to a juvenile detention camp.

Henrikson had reluctantly reworked his screenplay at the request of a producer back in 1995, and felt creepy about it.

"It was like I was paid a lot of money to drown my own child in a bathtub."

To pick himself up, Henrikson began volunteering with incarcerated kids through a Writers Guild of America program, and from the outset, it felt like what he was supposed to do with his life. In 1997 he began Street Poets Inc., a nonprofit aimed at reaching unreachable kids through the power of their own stories.

I met Henrikson by way of his wife, who is writing a script based on my columns and book about a skid row musician. When Henrikson told me about the Wednesday night trips he's been making for several years, using poetry to soften young delinquent hearts, I asked if I could tag along.

Camp Miller's setting looked more appropriate for a resort than a jail, with twilight shadows moving over rocky peaks and green canyons.

"The goal is total transformation in a kid," Henrikson said as he pulled into the lot with colleagues Alan Irie Reyes and Rob Thelusma, who help him run the writing workshops.

They agreed that one kid in particular, Mario, was in the midst of a breakthrough. A month earlier, he'd strutted into his first session like the gangster he was, but with each week and each new poem he'd penned, he had moved farther from his past.

We gathered in a space the size of a living room and the kids filed in with their weekly poems in hand. David, 15; Marquese, 16; Joseph, 14; Luis, 15; Nestor, 16; Manuel, 16; Antonio, 17; Mario, 18. Another kid came to the door and pleaded to be let in, but Henrikson told him the room was full for the night.

It's always full, with a waiting list for the next session.

In a city with growing divisions between black and Latino, there are no divides in the room where the teenagers meet each week, and for the most part, no artifice or pretense. They can let go of the preening and tough stuff in here.

Antonio, a pint-sized banger with a shaved head, had been waiting to ask Henrikson a question: