Feeding The Self: Prison food garden proposal

The short sell

This project has a simple aim, with broad effects. It will train prisoners in food and aesthetic gardening, using small scale, quickly rolled out, sustainable, high-yield, quick-reward agricultural systems. The result of this is that the prison will produce food for the community, as well as becoming a hub of food security and gardening expertise. This expertise would spread to the prisoners, connecting everyone involved in a community of practice based around the common good, and the peace and self-fulfilment that comes with creating food from nothing. The project is designed to, as much as possible, utilise existing resources; for example, labour and land are both immediately available within the prison. Existing prison staff, or trustworthy prisoners, act as the primary point of contact; all communication with other prisoners comes from existing staff, who we tutor, since the idea relies on pushing expertise and knowledge into the community rather than providing an endless training service. Most importantly, the course and garden are designed with specific contexts in mind, driven by ideas from the prisoners with infrastructure and advice coming from the project staff. In essence, this is about creative problem solving, and motivation to affect ones environment.
Outcomes & Objectives

Make the prison of direct value to the community by feeding it. Increase self-respect; prisoners become of value to the community, and thus of value to themselves. Meaningful skills provision; regardless of post-prison environment, prisoners learn useable skills. Skills that do not require external employment. Prisoner becomes a centre of expertise in the local community. Possibility of meaningful rehabilitation. Removal or remediation of several negative factors affecting prisoners homecoming; few profitable skills, low self-respect, unemployability, and so on. Giving prisoners garden build kits, so that from the day they get home they can be of active and demonstrated value to their community.
The idea

Prisoners, in groups of four, each manage a small (45m ) garden. This can be scaled up or down as far as large scale produce farming or window gardens. The development of this garden is based on permaculture principles, where multiple crops are grown together to encourage one anothers growth. Doing this will also increase the amounts of birds, butterflies and so on that exist within the garden space. The activities for the garden are those that are being used for the schools (see attached report), since they are designed to give rough outlines while allowing autonomy within each individual garden. They give simple, clear, reliable advice, and create results extremely quickly; the first food crop, for example, should come forth with a month of project start. This course is 12 weeks long, though the length and form are entirely adaptable to local requirements.