Doing Time in the Garden: Life Lessons Through Prison Horticulture

This is an excerpt from "Doing Time in the Garden" by James Jiler (Oakland: New Village Press, 2007), the first comprehensive guide to creating in-prison and post-release horticultural training programs. Jiler directs the Greenhouse Project, a horticultural job-training program for male and female inmates at New York City’s Rikers Island jail system. He also directs the GreenTeam of ex-offenders who work with community groups and institutions on landscape-related projects throughout New York State. The excerpt begins with a snapshot of the greenhouse program in action, and follows with details of Jiler’s teaching methods. Those working in art & corrections or arts & criminal justice may find Jiler's approach useful in their prison work.

Thirteen women are sitting in the classroom adjacent to the greenhouse when John Cannizzo and I arrive. The classroom is a brick and concrete structure that for all purposes serves as an office, library, kitchen, and workspace for our time at the greenhouse. There is a refrigerator and stove, three desks, two computers, shelves with a well-stocked library of gardening books, supply cabinets, a blackboard, a tropical fish tank and an aquarium where two turtles from the gazebo pond spend the winter. With the wind blowing on this cold morning, the classroom is a warm respite from the walk outside.

The faces of the women assembled look no different than any group of students in a learning class for adults. In their green and orange jump suits, they are inmates—women serving time for prostitution, drug possession, drug sales, assault and occasionally homicide. Yet, from the moment we begin work in the greenhouse or garden, they shed their roles as inmates and become my students. They are mothers, daughters, workers, wives and homemakers. They are women with a past that has little to do with the crime they’re serving time for. Some have apartments, families and jobs waiting for them when they leave jail. Others can expect only a bed in a shelter and maybe a program to help with their addiction to drugs. A number of my students have life-threatening ailments. Others are embroiled in long and agonizing fights to reclaim children who were placed in foster care. During our time in the garden, we will trade stories, laugh and even argue. We will talk about our interests, the mistakes we made, and what we hope for the future. Inside the greenhouse anything is possible: it is fertile ground for dreams, a place where new jobs, educational opportunities, renewed family ties, and healthy relationships sprout like mushrooms from the decaying matter of old lives. The challenge lies in taking the dreams achieved inside back to the hard reality of their lives outside. In all our conversations rarely have I heard a women student voice self-pity.

While most of the students spend the first minutes in the greenhouse drinking coffee and decompressing from the stress of life inside jail, Denise R. heads outside the classroom towards the shed where we store the tools. Denise is in her late twenties, strongly built and, despite living most of her life in the hot Caribbean tropics, is hardly fazed by the March cold. Rather, she is grateful to be at the greenhouse relieving her stress with hard labor. A mother of six, including a two and three year old, she tries to stay busy, for downtime is “slow time” accompanied by a flood of thoughts and worries about her kids at home. “Gotta stay busy,” she says. “Otherwise you think too much.” Grabbing a shovel and spading fork, she heads towards the back of the greenhouse facing Shore Road and two rows of razor wire fencing. There she plunges into the task of carving beds into the raised herb garden. She makes a circle with Belgian blocks to form a center. Three-foot beds shoot outwards like rays from a sun, and in between, separating each bed, is a brick pathway.

Denise’s work is part of a process that began the year before when a student first designed on paper her idea for a garden. When that student left another took her place, slightly altered the design, drew it to scale and with her group, broke ground and created beds out of salvaged bricks, two-by-fours and plastic edging. Now Denise has re-designed the beds and, using the donated Belgian blocks, is building a more permanent and elegant border. Soon, I tell her, we’ll plant lavender, sage, thyme, basil, mint, roses and rosemary. By summer we will have herbs to make soap, hair conditioner and hand lotion, products that are contraband in jail, but are used judiciously, and with supervision, at the greenhouse.

Jackie A., a sturdy Hispanic woman, serving a year for assault, heads immediately from the classroom into the greenhouse. A florist in her husband’s shop before her arrest—she stabbed a woman in self-defense—Jackie is the de-facto “manager” of greenhouse operations. With a calm efficiency, she produces a batch of seed-starting medium, measuring out three parts peat moss to one part perlite and vermiculite in a large metal bowl, spraying it with water, then mixing it together by hand.

The thirty-by-sixty-foot greenhouse with its three long worktables is not exactly a model of technology or efficiency. Several panes are missing glass and the heater occasionally crashes, leading on cold nights to the demise of tender seedlings and tropical houseplants. Too much heat can also kill the plants, especially on weekends when the greenhouse goes unattended for several days. Because our access to the greenhouse is limited to the hours our officers work, we can’t monitor troublesome conditions; yet, despite the sudden frosts and heat waves, we do remarkably well. The greenhouse produces an annual yield of several thousand vegetable, bedding and perennial seedlings that are used on Rikers or distributed to elementary schools, libraries and community gardens in the City.

Working with Jackie is Sonia B., a young Dominican woman, who quipped, when I first showed her the greenhouse, “they should lock me up for all the plants I’ve killed.” Under Jackie’s direction, Sonia has learned the fundamentals of running a greenhouse, and in the process has discovered both a talent and penchant for growing plants. She and Jackie are from the same neighborhood in the Bronx and as acquaintances from the streets, make a formidable team in the greenhouse. Sonia has eight months on her sentence—the result, she says, “of selling the wrong thing to the wrong guy.” Twenty-four years old, she talks of changing her life, first by kicking her habit with drugs and completing her GED, then finding a job that pays enough for her family to live on. Finally, Sonia hopes to regain custody of her year-old son who, through a court order, is living with her mother. With her charge of possession, Sonia is just one of 56,000 women inmates in the U.S. jail system incarcerated for substance abuse, and her son yet another child who will not spend time with his mother during her rehabilitation.

Bird and butterfly garden. Click here for slideshow

Sonia’s is a story that is replayed throughout prisons and jails across the nation. The population of female inmates has tripled in the past decade, and 75% of incarcerated women are mothers. In 1991, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency estimated that on any given day there were 167,000 children in the U.S. whose mothers were in jail, three fourths of whom were under the age of eighteen. Studies also show that children of jailed parents are often traumatized by the experience, and five to six times more likely to end up behind bars.

Jackie hands Sonia a tray filled with seed mix and tells her to plant echinacea, a perennial commonly known as coneflower. When ground into powder its roots are believed to boost the immune system. Jackie begins misting rows of germinated seedlings stretched out in assembly-line fashion down the long greenhouse benches. “The lettuce,” she says, “is ready to go.”

Guidelines for Managing a Successful Program

Be realistic
Setting realistic goals for both the students and the staff creates a framework for success that builds on and sustains itself through the life of the program. For example, students may have a learning disability, history of drug use or trauma-related mental disorder that has kept them at a level of low literacy and unemployment most of their lives. Although the program goal is to provide inmates with career jobs in horticulture it is unlikely that within a year students will be transformed into professional horticulturalists (though that possibility is certainly never ruled out). Rather, more moderate goals should be established: in five months students should be able to grasp fundamental basics of plant science or landscape design; they should be able to execute proper techniques in plant care and garden installation; and they should have an understanding of plant, animal, and human relationships.

Work goals should be reasonably set so that students and staff can feel a measure of accomplishment in the program. Many students have a history of failures in their life, and if they fail to meet either personal or project goals, they easily become frustrated and demoralized. Completing a series of small projects builds self-esteem and a foundation of success and achievement.

Create a work environment that promotes program goals
It is essential that the work environment be designed to meet the needs of both the staff and the students being served. If therapy is a major goal of the program, the instructors and correction officers must work with the inmates in a way that encourages communication, trust and respect. This openness is important when horticulture is being used to address issues affecting the students’ behavior. If the focus is on job development and job readiness, the environment should mimic the expectations and conditions of the workplace.

The Rikers GreenHouse, with its conjoined classroom, greenhouse and gardens, gives the instructor considerable freedom in establishing an integrated program that reflects the diverse needs of its students. For example, the large gardens surrounding the greenhouse are conducive to private conversations that allow the instructor to work one-on-one with inmates in relative privacy from other students or officers. Simultaneously, lectures can take place in the classroom, a meal using fresh food from the garden can be prepared in the classroom kitchen, and a professional pruning workshop can be conducted in another section of the garden.

Horticulture programs should be equipped with adequate tools for the students to pursue their day’s work efficiently. Apart from gardening or construction materials, resources that focus on particular subjects such as Integrated Pest Management, ethnobotany, or herbal remedies. or computers for professional development, books for a library and any other resources that strengthen the student’s ability to learn and ultimately function in a job outside of jail are essential for an effective program.

Choose an instructor
Whether your instructors are drawn from the staff or from the outside, they can transfer core knowledge through teaching and gardening programs, but without leadership, important goals cannot be accomplished. Instructors must tread a fine line between serving the needs of the students and strictly adhering to the regulations of the facility. It is not enough to simply establish relationships with the students. It is equally important to forge strong bonds with the supervising officers.

The instructor must be flexible and aware that enforced instruction is not always effective. Informal work sessions provide inmates the opportunity to explore their work environment and experience a reprieve from the regimentation of life in prison. A balance between formal and informal training and work projects is crucial. The instructor should be able to tap an individual’s motivation to learn skills critical to finding meaningful work on the outside.

Use a team approach
At the work site, a meeting should be scheduled every day to discuss job activities of the prior day and plan the tasks for each day. These regularly scheduled meetings help sharpen the focus of the crew’s efforts and track how well the curriculum is being implemented. Regularly scheduled meetings give the crew the opportunity to develop cohesiveness as a group, identify problems affecting the success of work being undertaken in the garden, and to receive positive reinforcement for successful efforts.

Give students clear instructions
Each student enrolled in a program could be asked to sign a contract that explicitly describes his or her responsibilities and the responsibilities of the staff. Such a contract may require the participant to follow the instructions of the staff and to be on time and ready to work. The students may be required to actively take part in self-assessment and maintain contact with the pro- gram after their release. Such agreements can make it possible for instructors to contact former students for a prospective interview should a job offer match the students’ skills.

Establish pre-release programming
Information about support services should be available for students as they get ready to leave jail. What are their needs? There are numerous substance abuse programs, health clinics, legal aid, subsidized/Section-eight housing and shelters, and vocational training programs that ex-offenders are eligible for (see Aftercare Chapter). Instructors should help students make career plans by being informed about the different opportunities in horticulture and its related fields. Interviews should be scheduled with prospective employers whenever possible, and problems that are barriers to employment should be addressed.

Develop a network
Because most programs operate with limited resources, garden or greenhouse programs may need to depend heavily on a network of private and corporate funders, concerned individuals and businesses, and governmental and non-profit agencies. A strong network improves the services provided to the students as well as services that can be provided to the community. It also increases public awareness of the program mission. Contacts on the outside can offer important resources, work opportunities and funding revenues. Nurseries can donate plant materials or seeds. Establishing relationships with nurseries, schools, and accredited associations and foundations are essential to a successful cost-effective program.

Be creative and draw on all available resources
Horticulture is wide open to a variety of work-related skills training. Computers can be used for different types of landscape programs, landscape design or for creating in-house newsletters. Inmates with artistic talent or construction or trade skills can utilize their knowledge for different gardening related projects. Outside experts in botany, landscape design, writing, art, tree maintenance or construction can also be brought in to provide workshops.

James Jiler has directed the Horticultural Society of New York's jail-to-street GreenHouse program at Rikers Island since the program's inception in 1997. He has also worked as a inner-city urban ecologist in Baltimore and New Haven and an agriculturist in Nepal. He holds a Masters Degree in forestry and social ecology from Yale.

Original CAN/API publication: June 2007