Farming at the Oregon State Correctional Institution

By Sarah Alvarez (co-authored with Sharath Patil)

I was pulling my car into Oregon State Correctional Institution’s parking lot in Salem early on a fall Friday morning. The institution was almost entirely surrounded by massive, vacant lawns and high barbed wire fences. The sky was overcast, and a disembodied voice from a guard tower resolutely watched my driving while reminding me where to park my car. It is not a place I would say is ideal for a budding gardener or aspiring law students. I was visiting to learn more about the prisons’ inmate gardening program to find out if a field trip to the facility and garden would be a worthwhile venture for law students.

I hesitantly walked to the prison entrance building (while the exacerbated, intangible voice reminded me to use the cross walk) where I went through a metal detector and other visitor processing. Shoes off, jacket off, bobby pins out of my pocket, feeling much more nervous than I usually do when I go through airport security. My co-fellow, Sharath, and I struggled with accommodating the strict non-blue wardrobe requirements required for entry into the prison (good thing we law students keep spare, non-blue suits in our car trunks), while we watched other people turned away at the prison entrance for wardrobe issue. Inmates wear blue, visitors cannot wear blue. We are not inmates.

We are Food Resiliency Project Fellows from the University of Oregon’s Environmental Law Center. Aside from staking the prison out as a future law school field trip, I was interested in this visit because the program intersects my interests in local food systems and the criminal justice system. We fellows met with three institution administrative staff to discuss the program’s ins and outs. Once Sharath and I passed successfully through security, we gathered at a long wooden table in a meeting room adjacent to the warden’s office. Here, we fellows and institution staff sat to talk about OSCI’s farm program.

Questions roved and we discussed our fellowship, the staff’s personal journeys that led them to their job, and the overall prison polices, but we started out discussing the program’s current practices. Inmates work in the facilities’ garden and greenhouse to grow a portion of the prison’s food. The program consists of very few inmates. In order to qualify for the program inmates must maintain good behavior while in prison and express interest in the program. The correctional institution has created the farming program for inmate rehabilitation in the hopes people will learn about a practical skill applicable post incarceration.

Though this program does help inmates, it also provides a monetary benefit to the prison. It costs about $2.25 a day to feed each inmate. The correctional facility usually relies on purchasing from the cheapest possible food supplier to provide these foods, like seasonal fast-food chain frozen meals. However, the agriculture program provides food to inmates at large, cutting as much as 10 cents off the usual $2.25 amount. This provision gives the inmates who work in the program a sense of community and accomplishment.

Inmates care for a plant starts with planning what they would like to grow that season and extends from its lowly, sprout beginnings in a new green house, to transferring a sprout from a pot to the outdoors, to managing pests, pruning, and harvesting. Interestingly, the program is almost entirely organic. When I inquired why, the administrator directly in charge of the inmates in the program said it was an easy choice to use organic practices because it was simply “better”. He also asserted that inmates really learned how to tend to young plants using the organic method. Because there is not a simple fix in spraying an herbicide or adding more fertilizer, people must be in tune to the plants needs seriously and long-term…no quick fix would do to help a withering sprout.

The prison administrator’s would like to grow the gardening program in the future. Though gardening skills could be transferable to working as a commercial farmer, or growing one’s own food, these positions and resources are not always easy to access, even for people who do not possess the extra difficulty of having a criminal conviction. So, in reality these gardening skills will likely be used in a more pragmatic way, like working in a lawn care business. To make the gardening program even more useful to inmates on the outside the prison plans to add a business management component to the gardening, so that inmates could be prepared to start their own lawn care service when they leave OSCI. Though this idea began with an interested prison administrator, inmates also come up with changes for the gardening program. For next Fall, one inmate suggested they grow pumpkins for prisoners’ families to take home for Halloween.

Though informative, much of what was missing from our meeting at OSCI was an inmate’s perspective. Do inmates really feel their work is valuable? Do they feel like the skills they are learning are truly transferable? Though we were assured in the affirmative for these questions, it is hard to truly know how inmates feel about their job. A field trip to work side by side with inmates could reveal more about the inmate perspective.