Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 17 No. 4 (2007) ISSN: 1546-2250 Response to Review of Doing Time in the Garden: Life Lessons through Prison Horticulture James Jiler Horticultural Society of New York Citation: Jiler, James. (2007). "Response to Review of Doing Time in the Garden: Life Lessons through Prison Horticulture." Children, Youth and Environments 17 (4). Retrieved [date] from http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/ As a just metaphor of gardening, the The Horticultural Society of New York’s GreenHouse “Jail-to-Street” Program on Rikers Island is continuously evolving to better prepare inmates for their release from jail. As stated in the book, 600,000 men and women leave jails and prisons each year, many ill-equipped to handle the pressures of home life and finding and keeping a job. A majority of ex-offenders suffer not only from long-term substance abuse, but are mentally ill or physically disabled. While the program focuses on this population with on-going horticulture therapy, education and vocational skill development, only a percentage of our students will pursue a career in the horticulture field. The others will hopefully use their experience in the garden to seek continued help in aftercare to live healthy and productive lives outside of jail. GreenHouse and its after-care GreenTeam Program are therefore doing more to reach at-risk youth in order to put young lives on track with skills and employment before they become institutionalized through the criminal justice system. Over the past two years, GreenTeam has worked actively with youth agencies such as Federation Employment and Guidance Service (FEGS), and with foster-care organizations such as Graham-Windham. The idea is to teach youth essential job skills in horticulture through handson work building gardens throughout New York City. Often, exoffenders from Rikers become mentors and instructors to the adolescent men and women who join GreenTeam. 413 As their skills develop, the youth “interns” are given responsible tasks working directly with clients and the Society’s organizational staff. This in turn builds their self-esteem, their confidence and their ability to navigate in a mainstream world as empowered equals. The results thus far have been extremely positive: FEGS youth who complete a GreenTeaminternship have a much higher job retention rate than any other group in the New York City FEGS agency. While Doing Time in the Garden offers an anecdotal snapshot of our work on and off Rikers, the curriculum we offer is a valuable tool for any program that aims to educate, teach and connect youth or adults to nature and gardening. The story, however, is on-going, and is played out in a variety of institutional settings across the country. As time passes we hope to integrate our experience with more scientific data in order to better understand how programs such as this impact individual lives. At the least, our interns are leaving in their wake, garden-by-garden, a simple roadmap for improving the social and environmental health of the city while transforming and hopefully improving their own lives. James Jiler is Director of The Horticultural Society of New York's GreenHouse Program, a jail-to-street horticulture program at New York City's jail complex on RikersIsland. He is author of the book Doing Time in the Garden (NewVillagePress, 2006), which details the GreenHouse approach to rehabilitation and explores the role of gardening in jails and prisons around the country. Prior to his work at Rikers, James worked as an urban ecologist in inner-city neighborhoods in Baltimore and New Haven, and with USAID developing an urban green belt in Ahmedabad, India. He also lived in Kathmandu, Nepal where he worked for the Ministry of Agriculture establishing ecological farming systems in the Himalayas; as a lecturer at Nepal's graduate university in writing; and as a Himalayan trekking guide for a U.S.-based adventure travel company. He holds a Master’s Degree in Forestry from YaleUniversity. ...