For my capstone project, I am looking at social farming operations in prison systems. I began my project last fall while on a study abroad program in Italy. The program was led by anthropology professor Ann Anagnost. Entitled “The Culture and Politics of Food in Italy,” this program included lectures on food systems, visits to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, attendance at Slow Food’s giant Terra Madre Conference, and a farm stay in rural Italy. It was through this program that I was exposed to the use of social farming as a rehabilitative therapy for prisoners: thirty-two prisons in Italy offer farming programs to their inmates, and the country has an extensive system of agricultural social cooperatives which employ some of these prisoners upon completion of their sentence. While in Italy, I produced an independent study research paper on this topic, visited a social farming cooperative and stayed with an Italian farmer, Beppe, who had practiced social farming for ten years. 

Now that I am back in Seattle, I am working with an organization in Washington that provides similar programs to inmates at twelve of our state prisons. The Sustainability in Prisons Project (SPP) is a collaborative effort between Evergreen State College and Washington State’s Department of Corrections. Since 2008, the SPP has established a myriad of programs to educate and inspire inmates and make our prison operations more sustainable. This includes rainwater catchment systems, organic gardens, composting, bee keeping, nurseries, rearing of endangered frogs and sustainability lectures. While one goal of these programs is certainly to reduce the environmental footprint of our correctional facilities, it also seeks to engage the inmates in sustainable operations, providing them with more diverse job opportunities and spaces where they can take on responsibility and succeed. 

For my internship, I am working with two crews of inmates at Cedar Creek Corrections Center (CCCC) to coordinate and manage their organic gardening program. CCCC is a fairly small (~480 inmates), minimum-security prison outside of Olympia. SPP has been working with this prison the longest, and so their programs at CCCC are well established. My goal is to help make their organics gardens more productive and in sync with the needs of their kitchen. To that end, I am providing recommendations for organic soil amendments to increase the productivity of their many garden plots. I am also working with the inmates to develop a comprehensive planting schedule, which, by including principles of crop rotation and succession planting, should increase their yields throughout the growing season in a series of manageable harvests. I am going to stay on as a volunteer for the rest of the growing season to help with planting and harvesting each week. 

My experiences volunteering at CCCC have been very positive. The staff is incredibly supportive of the gardening programs, and I am working with two great crews of inmates. Though I enjoy my time spent there each week, it can still be a little awkward at times to be working in a prison. Before January, I had never actually seen a prison, let alone set foot inside one. For the safety of both the inmates and myself, there are certain rules about how we can interact with each other (i.e. we all must refer to each other by our last names) and policies that dictate what we are able to get done each day (i.e. forms need to be filed to use a ladder to fix the greenhouse). But I think this awkwardness is an important part of understanding the application of social farming in a prison setting. It is one thing to write about the benefits of social farming for inmates, it is another to work with inmates each week in a garden. And recently, I have been so wrapped up in measuring garden plots, asking questions about planting history, discussing what seeds to order and familiarizing myself with the gardens that I haven’t had much time while I’m there to dwell on the fact that I’m in a prison, working with inmates. They don’t do much to remind me of that either. 

Photos: (1) A classmate, our host farmer Beppe, and me in Umbria, Italy.  (2) An inmate’s sweater hanging in the greenhouse at CCCC. (3) The aquaponic gardening system at the greenhouse in CCCC. (4) A member of an agricultural cooperative in Rome, Italy showing us their composting system.