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 “I Can Grow Cabbages” In 1973, Catherine Sneed hitchhiked from Newark, N.J. to San Francisco, CA. She was seventeen years old, and she arrived friendless, penniless and pregnant. As she says today, “I’ve been there” – been where the jail inmates she works with have been. She managed not to end up on the streets, but used her welfare support to go to college. Upon graduation, she began working in the Sheriff’s Department, hoping to help inmates get out and stay out. It was a discouraging and exhausting task. A serendipitous event transformed her experience. A friend gave her a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. “I read the book and I thought that I was called. I thought that the book said that if you connect people with land, then they have hope, they have a sense of future….” She went out into the jailyard with prisoners and began to create a garden. She knew nothing about gardening. She was told by prison guards that the inmates wouldn’t cooperate and wouldn’t care. Her experience was the opposite. With bare hands, because there were no tools, she and the inmates removed debris and began cultivating the land. Thus was born The Horticulture Program at the San Francisco Jail. Over a hundred prisoners participated. Catherine enrolled in a gardening program at U.C. Santa Cruz so they all could learn more about what they were doing. The garden began producing, abundantly. The vegetables were given away to soup kitchens. Why given away rather than sold? “We gave it away because…what I realized was: the reason the prisoners were so enthusiastic about it was because for the first time they were able to do something, they were able to give, give of themselves, the only thing they had…. What I began to see was that these people were saying, ‘I’m better. I’m not just a prostitute. I’m not just a thief. I can grow cabbages, lettuce, broccoli.’” Prisoners coming up to their release time did not want to leave the jail. They wanted to continue working in the garden. So Catherine developed a second stage of the program, The Garden Project, in which former inmates report to work as gardeners, both at the jail’s eight acres and at a plot in the city. In this program, the produce is sold to restaurants and the gardeners are paid. Compared to other released inmates, Garden Project workers are 25% less likely to end up back in jail. “When we lack the faith that these people can change,” says Catherine, “we’re really expressing our lack of faith in our own humanity.” Linked to the land, everyone’s humanity can blossom. “We’re not just growing plants - we’re growing people.” Resources:
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