Interview with a former inmate

Today we interviewed Peter, a former inmate from a prison in California. He worked in the prison garden while he was there. Working in the garden was a really awesome experience for him and he’s glad he did it. We learned a lot that we hadn’t known before, and he encouraged us to consider issues we hadn’t previously thought about. Here are a few notes from our conversation:

• The garden was relatively large, 5 acres (about 4 football fields), and they grew many different things on it, from strawberries to brussels sprouts.
• All of the food from the garden was donated to a homeless shelter rather than being used in the prison kitchen. The reason for that is because the prison gets substantial funding for the kitchen and are not in need of more produce.
• Peter described how the garden was run…some inmates were paid to work in the garden while others were volunteers. They had to be invited to work on it, and they could always use more help. Everyone has to have a job at the prison, and working in the garden provided a very different experience than the more standard prison jobs.
• Some inmates are eager to learn during their incarceration, and the garden provides a good opportunity for this. It also serves the purpose of passing time and just getting by.
• Gardening was a much harder job than other prison jobs in terms of labor and work ethic. It attracted people that wanted to work hard and that wanted to try and take a break from the normal prison life for a little while.
• The garden was mostly inmate run, but a prison staffer oversaw it. Classes were mostly taught by other inmates. Peter was in a low security prison that sounds quite similar to SCI-Pittsburgh, and many of the inmates were white-collar types that could teach various classes. They had classes about herbs and horticulture, to name a couple. The classes served to keep people interested in the garden and to keep them busy.
• There were some issues with the garden…people hiding things in it or stealing from it. As Peter put it, “that shit’s just gonna happen in prison.”
• There was no problem at all with gardening being seen as feminine. People were really excited about it, and Peter thinks that if we start one, there will be absolutely no problem finding people to work in it.

Questions we didn’t get to ask due to time constraints:

• Did any community members come work on the garden with you?
• Do you know if family members were allowed to work in the garden with inmates?
• Was there a greenhouse at the prison?
• Did he continue gardening after his release?
• Did any of the gardening prisoners get jobs in horticulture after being released?
• Was there any sort of post-release program?

Affinity Diagramming Our Research

In preparation for our visit to SCI-Pittsburgh, we decided to go back through some of our interviews and research to pull out trends. We created an affinity diagram and were able to gain some new insights into the way the different parts of our project fit together. This provides us with a succinct way to present our research to the staff at the prison and to get their feedback.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with affinity diagramming, it’s a way to organize data. Each white slip of paper is a single piece of information we gained from our interviews with Debbie and Bret or from James Jiler’s book. Those are organized under themes that are then described by blue post-its. It’s a bottom up process, so we create the blue labels after we group the white post-its. Then we look for similar themes between the blues and categorize those under pink post-its. Finally, the green post-its capture larger themes in the data.

Our big takeaway from this process was that the New Leaf project can be divided into three themes: benefits, programming, and logistics. We already have a solid understanding of the benefits of a garden program through our online research. We learned about programming from Bret. Now the prison visit will teach us more about logistics. One of our goals will be to learn what types of barriers exist in terms of logistics and how they can be overcome.