“That’s my baby,” said Mike Cruz, a stocky young man who is serving time at Rikers. He was gesturing toward a patch of flowers whose flamboyant shade of orange matched the stripes on his prison jumpsuit.
“It’s a Mexican sunflower,” he said. “I put the seeds in myself, and look at it now, it’s 5 feet tall. You get to watch them grow, you feel good about that. It’s like having a child.”
The 2 1/2-acre garden where Cruz and three other prisoners were working is one of seven at Rikers created by the Horticultural Society of New York in partnership with the New York City Department of Correction.
The GreenHouse, as it is called, is the nation’s oldest and largest prison garden. It has quietly flourished for the past three decades, a period during which rampant gang violence and a scandalous culture of abuse among the guards made Rikers the most notorious jail in America.
So when the city finally closes Rikers Island, as it plans to do by 2026, few New Yorkers will miss it. But also lost will be a garden sanctuary in the nation’s largest penal colony that has a remarkable track record for keeping inmates who have worked the soil there out of prison.
For more than 500 incarcerated men and women who enter them each year, the gardens are a tranquil refuge from the chaos of jail. Not everyone, however, is charmed at first. Some don’t want to wake up early — the garden workday begins at 6 a.m. Others found the idea of working with plants to be insufficiently macho.
Cruz’s objections were more visceral.
“I didn’t like dirt, I didn’t like bugs,” he said as he prepared some flowering echinacea for a circular bed. “But I gave the garden a chance, and it’s like crazy, I fell in love with it.”
He says that he especially enjoys pruning the roses. “It’s a thinking job, it’s like a puzzle,” he said. “You need to figure out what bad stuff to cut out to get the good stuff to grow.” Cruz now spends 20 hours a week there.
The inmates arrive at the garden by bus accompanied by two unarmed correction officers, trading their cells for a glass greenhouse, a goldfish pond, a wooden gazebo and scores of raised soil beds growing organic vegetables and herbs. There are peach trees, fig trees and papaya trees. There is a grape arbor, as well as a chest-tall patch of native plants thronged with butterflies and bees, visited by the occasional opossum.
It is almost certainly the only place on the island where the incarcerated call the shots. Aided by a team of experts from the Horticultural Society (the Hort, as it’s known to those involved), the inmates plan the gardens and landscaping, build the sheds and other small structures and choose seeds from a catalog during the winter.
The men don’t always come with prior knowledge of the flowers that they are ordering, according to Hilda Krus, the director of the GreenHouse, so they tend to choose ones with beguiling, feminine-sounding names. One participant loved a showy perennial he had tended there so much that he named his first daughter Chrysanthemum.
“I’ll miss this garden,” said Keith Johnson, whose 10 1/2-month stay on the island ends in a few weeks. “But not Rikers,” he added.
Johnson, who has been offered a paid internship with the Hort after he is released, was raking a path as a flock of Guinea fowl (a gift from a prison farm on Long Island) clucked and pecked for insects around his feet.
“People are especially fond of Limpy, a bird that was hurt when it flew into a barbed wire fence,” Krus said. “They say, ‘This bird is like me, I’m also injured, they might want to get rid of me, but they won’t succeed.’”
The same care goes to damaged or unattractive plants that would be thrown away in most other gardens. “The students tell me, ‘We don’t want to get rid of things that are imperfect.’ They do everything that they can to save them,” Krus said.
“Development in a garden is slow,” she added. “Some things change overnight, but most things develop slowly.”
When the GreenHouse started, its aims were modest. In the late ’80s, a single volunteer, Barbara Margolis — a Hort board member and official in the administration of Mayor Edward Koch — funded a small garden, where she socialized with inmates and offered them employment advice. The garden expanded, and it was eventually promoted as a job-training program, which was enthusiastically supported by the city, eager to demonstrate that it was equipping people for life after prison.
As word of the brutal conditions within Rikers spread, the focus shifted. “People started saying that we should not be treating these people like criminals, because 70% of them suffer from mental health issues,” recalled Sara Hobel, the Horticultural Society’s current director. “The city began to realize that not everybody is ready for work. Many of these guys had led lives of trauma. We need to deal with that first.”
This was when Krus was hired, and the focus of the garden shifted from vocational training to life skills: self-care, nutrition, teamwork, personal responsibility.
As innovative as it was when it was founded, the GreenHouse is no longer unique. There are others, like the Insight Garden Program, which combines gardening with mindfulness training. It operates in California’s San Quentin prison and 13 other facilities nationwide and serves approximately 1,500 incarcerated people annually, according to the group’s founder, Beth Waitkus.
Amy Lindemuth, a landscape architect from Seattle, helped design a garden for incarcerated women and their children at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County. She notes that gardens and farms in prisons were common in the early 20th century, but they fell out of favor after the deadly Attica prison riot in 1971, when security concerns became paramount.
“These gardens help repair the damage that people have been through, both in prison and in their earlier lives,” she said. “They are quiet places to be alone with your own thoughts away from the cacophony and stress of the prison environment.”
Not everyone is a fan, at least at first. Jails still prioritize security and discipline, which can be hard to maintain in a garden setting. While some guards at Rikers were initially skeptical of the program, most who work in the garden come to see its value.
Officer Ronald Wells, who has spent 14 years on the island, said the garden taught him a less adversarial way of relating to the men. Many guards on the island suffer from PTSD, he said, and the garden also helps them cope with the stress of their role.
“I’ll be working side by side with them using the shears, raking leaves, and they really open up to me,” Wells said. “I talk to them about their goals, their problems. It allows you to come out of just being a correctional officer and relate to people as human beings.”
Stacey King, executive director for educational services at the Department of Correction, said that lessons learned in the garden program are being applied to a recently instituted “reform agenda,” which includes initiating a number of so-called “re-entry programs” that train people in trades like automobile repair, carpentry and cooking.
King said that these rehabilitation programs minimize conflict. “It’s proven that reducing idleness reduces violence,” King said. “Participants in the GreenHouse project are less likely to act out, because they enjoy the garden and don’t want to endanger their participation in it.”
But the question remains: How much effect can a few gardens have on the culture of violence at a place like Rikers?
“The program brings much needed humanity to the people who take part,” said Dr. Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer of New York jails and the author of “Life and Death in Rikers Island,” a book on the health risks of incarceration.
“But,” he added, “it’s a minor influence when put against the overall inhumanity of Rikers Island.”
“We have incredibly high rates of institutionalized brutality,” he continued. “Sure, a program like this gives us important lessons, it has a positive effect. But the real question is: Why do we parcel out human treatment to such a small group of people? Why haven’t we translated those lessons to the way the rest of the jail system works?”
Crucial to evaluating the success of rehabilitation programs like GreenHouse is recidivism, the rate at which formerly incarcerated people return to prison.
According to Prof. Deborah Koetzle of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 68% of those released from U.S. prisons are rearrested within three years. On Rikers, the recidivism problem is even worse: Close to half return to jail within a year.
For Koetzle, these dismal statistics prove that “the prison system is broken.” “We lock people up, we don’t provide the services they need, and we make it difficult for them to get jobs when they come home,” she said. “Prisons cause a lot of harm.”
While a garden can blunt that harm, it won’t eliminate it, she said. But it does appear to help.
A 2008 study by Alison Laichter, a graduate student at Columbia University, showed that participants in the GreenHouse program had a 40% lower rate of reconviction than inmates in the general prison population. Similar results are reported for the garden at San Quentin.
But according to Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge, it is difficult to say whether green prison programs are the cause of this difference.
“Serious or violent offenders are unlikely to qualify for such programs,” he said. “So perhaps those who are selected into them were less likely to reoffend to begin with.”
While the precise effect may be hard to quantify, Taariq King credits the garden with his transformation from a frightened young inmate without job skills to someone who has found a sense of direction in his life.
King was sent to Rikers at the age of 18, accused of second-degree murder and possession of a weapon. Early in his jail stint he tried working in the garden, which was way outside of his comfort zone, he said. But the garden grew on him quickly.
After two years of waiting for his trial, he was eventually acquitted. He entered the Hort as an intern, and now is a full-time employee.
On a recent Thursday, he was out with a team planting flowers at Parkside and Ocean Avenue across the street from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Largely because he found the garden, he now considers his time in jail as “a curse that turned into a blessing.”
His fondest memory of the garden, he said, was when Krus brought a bucket full of water that had rose petals soaking in it for King to wash his feet in after he had waded into a pond full of algae scum. “It was amazing,” he recalled. “My feet felt tingly for hours.”
This article originally appeared in
.