Green Prisons, Reentry and the New Economy

by Matt Kelley · 2009-10-15 07:37:00 UTC
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Today is Blog Action Day, and 8,624 bloggers around the world are writing about climate change -- covering this critical issue from countless perspectives, telling stories from the personal to global. I was happy to see climate change as the focus for today’s day of action, because it’s an issue that affects absolutely every one of us. Prisons, and prisoners, are not immune.

I’ve written before about green initiatives at prisons across the country and around the world -- from an urban farm at a Chicago jail to ecological practices and alternative energy production at prisons in Washington, California and elsewhere.

We shouldn’t only be green inside our prisons, however. We should create a green path out of our prisons. Corrections departments and facilities around the world offer many kinds of training for prisoners, including GEDs and college degrees, vocations like carpentry and plumbing and artistic talents like painting and video production. But prisons are too far behind the curve. Green jobs -- including earth-friendly construction and solar panel manufacturing and installation among many, many other specialties -- are certain to be booming in the years ahead, and prisons are a perfect place to teach these trades. Not only could prisoners work to retrofit prisons for lower energy consumption, but they can learn skills in the process.

This isn’t a new idea. Barack Obama wrote about it in Dreams From My Father. Van Jones, the former White House green jobs czar, has taken a leadership role on the issue. Organizations like Sustainable South Bronx and Jones' Ella Baker Center promote and provide green jobs training for the formerly incarcerated.

Some people argue that we shouldn’t expend resources on training prisoners and the formerly incarcerated to be ahead of the job curve, but these people are flat wrong. If we train prisoners in obsolete skills, we’re asking for a cycle of unemployment and poverty that leads to more crime. If we train them for the jobs of the future, we could be simultaneously saving our environment and ensuring opportunity after incarceration.

The green revolution is underway, and green jobs are a sure thing. We should include prisoners as we build this new economy.

Photo by Wayne National Forest

Matt Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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