Champagne Philippe Gonet Launch of Belemnita 2005
By Jen Shek Voon
At the medium-level security San Quentin State Prison, just outside San Francisco, prisoners can be seen tending to and growing food in gardens. Behind the steel fences and barbed wire, prisoners are given a new lease of life and opportunity to acquire new skills by growing and maintaining a food garden. A joint programme by Planting Justice, a group that helps less well-to-do communities by building gardens and creating jobs in urban food production, and Insight Garden Programmes, which has been helping inmates at the San Quentin prison learn skills in flower gardening, believe that not only does it give the inmates something to do, but it also lowers the chances of them being incarcerated. Plant Justice’s figures show that only ten percent of released inmates who have gone through the programme re-enter prison, compared to four in ten normally. The gardening programme has been incredibly successful, sometimes producing an abundance of food as happened in a Missouri prison, which donated the rest of the food to food pantries, churches, shelters, nursing homes and schools.
