PRISON TO PANTRY
Through the Sustainability in Prisons Project, inmates at the Washington State Corrections Center are growing food for needy families outside the gates.
Story by Calvin Cloney | Photos by Matthew Pearson
An emerald green field lined with rows of crops and accented by marigolds swaying gently in the cool breeze. A concrete lot with tents jammed haphazardly together, surrounded by cinder block buildings. One of these is ringed with wire fences, towers and armed guards, to keep a close eye on the occupants- the other is a parking lot in Olympia.
These locations are bound together by the Sustainability in Prisons Project, where inmates learn to tend the lush lawns, plentiful crops and overflowing greenhouses of their prison, Washington state’s Washington Corrections Center. The food grown by inmates, many of whom are likely to have been in poverty themselves, isn’t sold and used exclusively on site. Instead, it is donated to local food banks like the Thurston County Food Bank, supplying much needed produce and providing prisoners with a unique opportunity to serve the community while behind bars.
Terry, an inmate, stands beaming in front of a row of plants in the greenhouse. He used to be a math tutor in the prison, but could no longer work there after teaching for too many years.
“I looked for a place where I could help people and make things beautiful,” said Terry.
He now helps in one of the correction center’s two greenhouses, harvesting seeds and preparing edible and non-edible plants for cultivation.
The inmates in the program want to help the community, said Benji Deanon, the correction center Grounds and Nursery specialist. They see donating their harvest to food banks as a way do some good.
People don’t live their whole lives inside these fences though. They end up there through circumstance, says Ron Helms, a criminal justice researcher at Western Washington University.
People with lower annual incomes are incarcerated at the higher rates than those more well-off, a study by the Prison Policy Institute shows. Despite making up 23 percent of the non-incarcerated population, people with an income below $22,500 a year make up 57 percent of the prison population.
Programs such as the Sustainability in Prisons Project, that donate to food banks are always welcome, said Heather Sundean, the operations manager at the Thurston County Food Bank warehouse.
“We really appreciate all the different ways that people grow and donate produce and it has a significant impact on the patrons that come to see us for a food bank visit,” she said.
There was no line outside outside the food bank on a weekday afternoon, but inside was as bustling as any grocery store. Families clustered together, pushing carts down identical aisles to receive a wide variety of food.
Some of the food taken from the food bank that day might have come from the corrections center, which donated over 14,000 kilograms of food to local food banks last year alone.
Local operations help the food bank have a considerably wider menu than they otherwise would have. “That’s where the local produce really comes in and fills a gap,” Sundean said, “We have a little bit of everything.”
In Washington more money is set aside for prisons than hungry families. In the 2017–2019 budget, The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program received a $65 million cut in funding. Meanwhile, Washington spent $694 million on the department of corrections during the 2018 fiscal year.
Back inside the correction center greenhouse, Terry enthusiastically tells the prison’s public information officer, Yvonne Brumfield, about the wide variety of plants inside the greenhouse.
“We’re not after production,” Deanon later explained.
Plant Manager Dennis Shelton said they treat the program as a learning experience for inmates, teaching skills like landscaping and gardening in an effort to reduce the number of inmates who return to prison after release. The rate of recidivism in Washington state is a shocking 32 percent, meaning one in every three people released from prison will end up back behind bars.
This program’s mission is to provide an opportunity for inmates to help some of Washington’s most vulnerable, and in turn helps prevent them from ending up back behind the fences.
