Doing Time in the Garden: Life Lessons through Prison Horticulture
James, Jiler (2006).
Oakland, CA: New Village Press; 176 pages. $24.95. ISBN 0976605422.
Few people know as they fly into La Guardia airport in New York City that just beyond their runway, out in the water of Flushing Bay, sits Rikers Island, the city’s jail for those awaiting trial and those with sentences of less than one year. Rikers hosts the nation’s largest prison system of 415 acres with ten different jails, one of them a facility for adolescent offenders. Even less well-known are the island’s gardens, designed and created by some of the inmates in the GreenHouse project run by the New York Horticulture Society in collaboration with the Department of Corrections. For some of the city’s 14,000 people held in jail every day, the GreenHouse project offers hope and a new life.
James Jiler, author of the book and the director of the program since its inception in 1997, describes this prison garden program in the context of the U.S. prison culture. He escorts the reader through planning processes for new gardens and garden features, to curriculum content, to the how-to’s of engaging people with no gardening experience in the steps to becoming proficient and knowledgeable. In the same way a gardener writes down the seeds he planted in one gardening year to track what does well and what does not, we learn how the garden program keeps track of its gardeners with each person’s vital information on how long they must serve, how much education they have so that from day one in the garden, as these people learn new skills, they begin to be prepared for release and possible future employment in the professional horticulture industry.
Prisoners’ backgrounds often include diagnosed or undiagnosed learning disabilities, childhood abuse, personal drug use and/or family drug use. A horticultural therapist, also from the New York Horticultural Society, helps with the therapeutic approach to the gardening process. As all gardeners know, just digging in the dirt can be therapeutic, but having a professional on hand to support people’s healing helps too in this garden where so many participants have painful histories.
Jiler, in an interview, points out that the program is not a panacea. Many years of therapy will be necessary for most of these inmates to really pull their lives onto track. But the garden offers job training, time in the out-of-doors, access to food grown collectively to be eaten in the garden, a huge sense of accomplishment as plants bloom and new paths or features get built, and the camaraderie of collective engagement in a process that creates food and beauty. Excellent photos throughout the book illustrate the gardeners’ accomplishments.
The New York Horticultural Society did begin work on Rikers Island with adolescent detainees in the early 1990s, but now they focus on work with adult prisoners, male and female, because of the constraints of school requirements. The adolescents are required by law to be in school through the age of 18, so their gardening endeavors come as an integrated part of school curriculum and depend on teachers who are keen to use gardening as a learning environment for multiple disciplines (personal interview with Jiler, 10/9/07). The curriculum outline in the book could be used in a high school or after-school gardening program for youth. The metaphors for composting the “waste” can be applied easily to the life challenges any young person faces, the failures seen as the composting debris that will enrich the garden soil for future endeavors.
Post-release, the program’s GreenTeam offers job counseling and a placement program for the gardener-inmates once they are released back to their lives in the city. The city Parks Department and local landscaping companies work closely with the program to help place “graduates” into jobs that will allow them work with dignity. One of the big challenges for all those released from jails is that most entry-level jobs offer minimum wage, and if people have families, $7.50 an hour is not enough to support a family. People must overcome huge hurdles to make their lives in the community outside of the fast money of the drug world. In the meantime, the city’s libraries benefit from a program that has prisoners planning, planting and maintaining gardens at libraries.
Doing Time in the Garden gives someone with no knowledge of the nation’s prison system a better idea of the obstacles that challenge a person attempting to create a new, healthy life post-jail. It offers a fascinating glimpse of how gardening can be used to engage people in meaningful activity at a time when life may seem meaningless. At the same time, it prepares them for satisfying careers doing work that serves communities with beauty and healthy food. The case studies of individual gardeners offer greater insight into how life’s challenges manifest and can be met with the support network the GreenTeam provides, but much still is needed to help people make it once they return to their very difficult situations on the outside.
Nationwide statistics on prisoners who are offered education or vocational training shortly after leaving jail show the value of this effort: a 28 percent recidivism rate for those who get these services compared to 67 percent for those who do not. It is cheaper to provide education and training than imprisonment—about $39,000 compared to $57,000. Doing Time in the Garden gives us a glimpse of the national situation for detainees with the specifics of the Rikers Island program. Over two million people are in jail in the U.S. at this time. A savings of $18,000 per prisoner to offer vocational training on the level of the Rikers Island program for detainees and those who have served their time means a national savings of $60 billion, with recidivism cut in half.
The book offers evidence that it does matter to make these efforts to bring life into the barren world of prisons, that the chance to learn and use one’s knowledge to create gardens can make a person less likely to return to prison. The act of gardening “redefines prison ecology as a series of meaningful and positive relationships between people, culture and nature” (85).
James Jiler has a background in the Peace Corps in India and in work with the department of agriculture in Nepal and USAID in India. He earned a Masters in Forestry at the Yale School of Forestry and Social Ecology, has worked as an urban ecologist in New Haven and Baltimore, and how resides in New York and commutes to Rikers Island.
Reviewer Information
Illène Pevec is a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center and works with the Children, Youth and Environments Research Center. She facilitates the creation of school and community gardens in primarily at-risk, urban environments with children and their families.