Articles / Rehabilitation from the Ground Up

View the Roots to Reentry photo gallery
Credit: Margaret Funderberg

Jamie Oliver may have trademarked the idea of a food revolution with his recent reality show, but in Philadelphia, a less-publicized food revolution is taking place in the backyard of the local city jail where a garden tended by roughly two dozen inmates at any given time is used to grow seedlings and organic produce for community gardeners, local food pantries, and soup kitchens. "We produce thousands and thousands of pounds of food for donation," says Sharat Somashekara, city gardens coordinator for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which helped establish the program through its Philadelphia Green program. "Our whole garden is managed organically," he adds. "We build the soil, we compost, we cover crop—we even make our own cayenne pepper spray."

An organic grower himself, Somashekara got involved in the program, dubbed "Roots to Reentry" by the horticultural society, when it was first launched just over four years ago. He says its his way of serving what he considers a group of people who have lacked opportunities—those who've come from broken homes, abusive environments or poverty, who never had the resources to find their way anywhere but jail.  "I notice a positive change in 90 percent of the people I deal with. It's not just an increase in vitality and health, but an increase in confidence, an increase in respect and in working with others," he says.

Somashekara, along with corrections officer Tom O'Neal of the Philadelphia prison system, teaches both male and female inmates at the prison for about three hours a day in sessions that last eight weeks on average. Depending on the season and the level of skill in each class, those three hours are divided between hands-on work in the garden and classes on soil science, plant propagation, and the mechanics of organic agriculture. The inmates are also taught simple math and science related to farming, which in turn provides them with basic job readiness skills. And often, the program offers even more rudimentary skills that inmates may be lacking: how to work well in groups, how to listen to a supervisor and how to follow instructions. Everything they grow is donated to the local community. "I wouldn't have it any other way," says Somashekara. "I don't want it to appear as though we're exploiting these people [by making money off of their work]. And that's one reason why we don't use chemicals. That would be exposing people who are already chemically injured to more chemicals," he adds, referring to the fact that many criminals have been found to have high levels of lead in their blood. [as well as other health problems].

The inmates get just one chance to participate in the program, in part because it's so popular that there's a waiting list to get in. If people who start the program and don't fully embrace the opportunity, he says, they get asked to leave. "If they had a chance and they blew it, there are 100 other inmates who want the job," he says. "Being a part of our program is a privilege. On a certain level, it sounds cold, but there are so many people that need to be served. Resources are scant, time is scant. We're compassionate people but we have to be firm as well."

Prison gardens like Philadelphia's are common in cities and states around the country, in urban areas like the San Francisco County Jail, which is perhaps the largest such program in the country, and rural areas like the Cedar Creek Corrections Center in southwestern Washington state, where inmates tend beekeeping operations as well as grow organic food for the prison's cafeteria. In fact, prisons are familiar ground for horticulture therapists, registered therapists who use gardening as a way to provide psychological rehabilitation and therapy. The therapists note that it gives inmates the ability to quickly see the results of their efforts, boosting their self-esteem and sense of responsibility, which will in turn, hopefully, make them less likely to wind up back behind bars.

What makes the Philadelphia program unique, says Somashekara, is the way the Roots to Reentry program is integrated with other environmental initiatives across the city. As mentioned, inmates raise seedlings that are distributed to 42 community gardens that participate in the Philadelphia Horticultural Society's City Harvest program. There, the seedlings reach full maturity under the care of residents who raise them organically. The resulting produce is donated to local food pantries operated by a local nonprofit called SHARE (Self-Help and Resource Exchange), which gives the produce to low-income residents along with the Health Promotion Council which handles nutrition education classes. Produce raised at the prison is also donated to SHARE's food pantries. "A lot more people who would not really care to understand or engage with prison inmates in Philadelphia are interacting with them," says Somashekara. "It's a way for people to feel connected to all aspects of their community."

Some inmates who complete the program go on to work at nurseries or landscaping companies after they leave the prison, and while Someshekara wants to provide people with job skills, that's not the ultimate goal. "Some people will go for a walk in a park instead of going to get high when they get out. Some participate in a community garden. And some people just increase their civic involvement," he says. "It's not just about farming. It's really about integrating them back into a life beyond poverty, whether that's material poverty or psychological poverty."