A Garden Behind Jail Walls

For 16 years, prisoners at Chicago's Cook County Jail have taken gardening classes and maintained a thriving garden behind the facility's barbed wire. Prisoners take a course to earn a master gardener's certificate and produce tons of fruits and vegetables on a 13,000-square-foot urban farm . For now, their harvest is donated to soup kitchens, but starting next year some of it will be sold to local restaurants. The goal is for the farm to become self-sustainable in the near future.

The project is an inspiring example of the educational and social enterprise opportunities behind prison and jail walls. Prisoners learn a tangible skill and interact in a thriving enterprise, and their chances at successful reentry are improved. Recidivism rates for participants in the program are 17%, compared with national averages between 55% and 70%. The farm produces local produce that can feed the homeless or be sold to restaurants to sustain future farming operations. Every prison and jail in the United States should have a farm or garden like this. There's no reason not to.

The farm is a joint project of the Cook County Sheriff's Department of Community Supervision and Intervention and The University of Illinois Extension. I learned about it through a blog post by Mr Brown Thumb at Windy Citizen, who attended a graduation ceremony in September for 20 prisoners completing the program and took some beautiful photos as well as the video above. The jail recently broke ground on a greenhouse, which program coordinator Mike Taff said will be the first of its kind in the U.S.

I hope to see much more environmentally friendly design in our nation's prisons and jails in the years ahead. If Chicago's urban farm can pay for itself while training prisoners to farm and reducing recidivism, it'll be a model for programs around the country.