June 9, 2008

Serving vegetables while serving time

BY ROY MITCHELL

CENTRE — Jail. The word itself conjures restrictive images of orange jumpsuits, clutched iron bars with disheveled faces peering through, and barbed wire atop colossal fences. Riding past and observing the Cherokee County Detention Facility in downtown Centre, one just might conjure up a slightly different image of jail: vegetables.

Perceptive drivers on Cedar Bluff Road in Centre may double-take upon passing the county impoundment. Growing and flourishing at the base of the jail's western perimeter fence is a garden. The tiny, two-tiered plot features a healthy swelling of green, some that even overflows to the boundaries of the jail's chain-link fence.

Amidst the overflow of imprisoned greenery, wooden stakes scatter themselves amongst planted rows like notes on a treble cleft. The entire garden was planted by inmates; the leafy, green sprouts are nurtured by inmates; and inmates themselves will reap this summers harvest when it ripens.

The jail garden's actual size tallies much less than an acre, but detainees working there have maximized the available space into numerous varieties of fruits and vegetables. After the unloading of about six truckloads of dirt this spring, inmates planted a wide variety of seeds. Due to be harvested in the upcoming weeks from the diminutive but productive garden are tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, peppers, okra, and watermelons.

The driving purpose behind having an inmate-managed garden is not to create a facility food source at all, but to find a productive avenue for inmate activity.
“I thought it would be good to have a garden,” said Cherokee County Sheriff Jeff Shaver. “I have a garden myself. It's relaxing. It's a good pastime.”

So which prisoners in the Cherokee County Detention Facility reap gardening benefits? The jail already had a selected few prisoners designated as “trustees.” These trustees are inmates who provide free labor for the jail and sheriff's office. On a regular basis these trustees perform essential tasks such as washing patrol cars, changing light bulbs, doing laundry, and cleaning the building. It is these trustees who are allowed, one or two at a time, to cultivate the garden.

Sheriff Shaver points out that the expenses of dirt, fertilizer, seeds, and the like, were purchased out-of-pocket, so taxpayers dollars played no part in the funding of the garden experiment. Shaver said having a garden on the premises seems to have served its purpose well.

“It's something to keep them busy, and they enjoy doing it,” he said. “They work hard in it.”

Shaver isn't the first law official to successfully follow this garden formula of inmates planting and harvesting. Similar gardening projects are also succeeding in Utah and California prisons. According to www.theunion.com, a prison in Nevada County, Calif. saves $1,600 a year in disposal fees because their prisoners take thousands of pounds of food scraps from the facility's kitchen and use them to fertilize the soil in the prison garden. Not only do they plant fruits and vegetables, either; the kitchen scraps also aid them in harvesting earthworms.

In San Francisco County, according to www.well.com, the community has established a garden outside the detainment center as a logical extension of the gardening performed inside prison walls. The community garden would be accessible to those who have “graduated” from the prison garden program. In this particular Californian gardening experiment, inmates must meet grooming standards, and they earn a day off their sentences for every 45 hours of gardening. In all discovered cases, prison officials and inmates alike proclaim obvious benefits of a jail garden program -- gardening allows inmates to be active in completing constructive, hands-on tasks and prisoners achieve success and learn skills they can take with them when released.

“We're lucky to have a sheriff who will let us do this,” said Nick, one of the inmates in the Cherokee County facility.

According to the inmates some fellow trustees, who have since been released, also played a significant role in getting this local garden started.

“I have [put] a lot of work into it,” said J.P. another inmate in Centre. “I work in the garden whenever I get a chance, kind of in-between other jobs. It makes the time go by.”

The inmates' diligent work is about to pay off. With a proud grin, J.P. proclaimed their squash and tomatoes should be ready in another couple of weeks.