Gardening

[Guest guest]

I saw a show about this program on Link TV channel. It's very

inspiring. This is from today's Wall Street Journal:

 

GreenHouse in the Big House:

A Garden Behind Bars

By JANE GARMEY

November 15, 2006; Page D14

 

New York

 

I have relinquished my driver's license and been issued a security

pass. I am led through a succession of locked doors and dark

passages. Then, having now lost all sense of direction, I am finally

taken back outdoors. It is a beautiful day and I recoil from the

intense sunlight. In front of me is a high chain-link fence topped by

razor wire. A padlocked gate is opened and, lo and behold, I am in a

two-acre garden.

 

It is delightful -- filled with trees, shrubs, a butterfly border, an

enclosed vegetable garden, and even a small rock-lined pond. Someone

is weeding a flowerbed and others are trying to unclog and redirect

the flow of a small waterfall. A large family of guinea hens meander

over the grass; two rabbits, Bunny and Clyde, doze peacefully in

their wooden hutch; Donald Duck (his companion, Daisy, having

developed a bad case of bumble foot, has been moved elsewhere) is

asleep under a Buddleia bush, while a group of parakeets in a nearby

birdhouse (two of them a gift from a Russian barber in Queens) are

engaged in what seems to be a serious bird tussle.

 

 

A two-acre garden at Rikers Island is tended by a select group of

inmates, who are then eligible for horticulture- related internships

upon their release.

None of this would be the least bit out of the ordinary but for the

fact that the men working in the garden are prison inmates and this

garden is on Rikers Island. I am shown around by James Jiler,

director of the GreenHouse Project at Rikers and author of " Doing

Time in the Garden " (New Village Press). " GreenHouse " because, as Mr.

Jiler explains, in winter and spring a large greenhouse in the far

corner of the garden becomes the main locus of activity. Like most

gardeners, he wants to show me everything -- a living Christmas tree

donated eight years ago and now 20 feet high, some cast-off specimens

from the Parks Department native plant nursery that are now the

backbone of his native woodland garden, and a huge nectarine tree

grown from seed by a former inmate.

 

In summer, Mr. Jiler worries about how the plants survive hot

weekends when no one is around to water them, and in winter he frets

that intense fluctuations in temperature will wreak havoc on his

germinating seeds. But one problem he does not have is lack of help!

Five days a week, as many as 25 inmates (15 women and 10 men),

working on separate shifts, spend up to seven hours a day in the

garden, where they prune, weed, hoe, plant, harvest, and help care

for the animals. They also repair to a large brick building that

serves as a classroom. Here they learn about science, botany,

horticultural terms and techniques, nutrition and herbs, and take a

series of tests before completing the program. The recidivism rate of

those in the program is 15% as compared to 65% of the general inmate

population.

 

Mr. Jiler's right-hand aide is Hilda Krus, a soft-spoken

horticultural therapist from Germany who is doing an internship

before returning to her native country, where she would like to set

up a similar program. Like Mr. Jiler, she knows all the inmates in

the program on a first-name basis and tries as much as possible to

work with them one-to-one. On the day I was at Rikers, she was

demonstrating to a cheerful inmate named Hershey how to thin and

prune an overgrown bush. Two other women were eagerly attacking a

tangled mass of grape leaves choking another bush, while a third was

harvesting a crop of ripe peppers. Plans were afoot to make a crab

apple jelly recipe that Ms. Krus had found on a Web site --

supposedly the very same recipe made by Martha Stewart when she was

in prison, which delighted and amused the entire group. Getting to

eat what one grows is one of the attractions of the program and a

great way to escape what Hershey told me the inmates call " Fear

Factor food. "

 

In 1996, Anthony Smith became president of the Horticultural Society

of New York. One of his first endeavors was to reopen an earlier

GreenHouse program at Rikers Island that had been closed in 1993 when

its funding under a Youth Services Grant had been terminated by the

Giuliani administration. He enlisted the help of Mike Jacobson, a

former colleague in city government and then commissioner of the New

York City Department of Correction. Mr. Jacobson says that while he

can't remember his initial reaction to the idea, it was probably

along the lines of " Are you insane? " Nevertheless, Mr. Smith kept

talking, and the program got started in 1997.

 

Today, the Department of Correction makes available the two-acre

outdoor space with its greenhouse and classroom building, covers the

salaries of two corrections officers assigned to the garden, and

provides transportation for the inmate participants who are housed in

several different buildings on Rikers. The program, which costs less

than $250,000 a year, is run by the Horticultural Society of New

York, which is responsible for finding the funding, provided by a

variety of foundations and individuals.

 

Participants are recruited from inmates serving sentences of up to a

year and must spend at least three to five months in the program. If

they find they like working with plants, they are given the chance

when they leave jail to take up paid internships in GreenTeam, a

sister program also run by the Horticultural Society, where they

receive further horticultural training and are helped to find full-

time jobs in the field. There have been 330 graduates since the

program began and of these 68 have received permanent horticulture-

related jobs.

 

I met one such intern, William Rolle, on the day of my visit. Since

he had done a tree-climbing course as part of his internship, Mr.

Jiler had asked him to come back out to Rikers to assist with some

tricky high tree pruning. That very afternoon, he was having an

interview for a permanent job with a commercial landscape

construction company and, like many job applicants, he was a little

nervous and asked me to take a look at the résumé he would be taking

with him. I learned later that he got the job -- all the more

valuable to him because it included medical coverage. As we drove

back to Manhattan, I asked him what he had done before getting into

the GreenHouse Project. " I never did anything, " he replied. His kind

of success story doesn't get headlines very often, but it's what

makes this particular " jail to street " rehabilitation program all the

more remarkable.

 

Ms. Garmey writes on gardens and gardening for the Journal.