In 2011, Carolina Landa expected to take a typical prison job like washing clothes or working in the kitchen. She had just transferred to Mission Creek Corrections Center, a 321-bed, minimum-security prison in western Washington, and still had about three years left in her sentence. “And then I saw one that said ‘Butterfly Technician,’” Landa said. “And I was like … this sounds really different.”
The job was with the Sustainability in Prisons Project (SPP), a partnership co-founded by Washington’s Department of Corrections and the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, that connects inmates with conservation projects and sustainability initiatives. Landa got the job, and within a year she was rearing Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies, a federally endangered species, from larva to maturity. Since 2011, SPP has released more than 18,000 caterpillars and butterflies into the wild.
The work required painstaking attention to detail. “They start out, you can’t even see them,” Landa said of just-hatched caterpillars. She and three other women would document minute details during the phases of the caterpillars’ lives. They’d feed the caterpillars plantain leaves, build simulated habitats where the creatures would make cocoons, and fend off hungry spiders. Breeding was part of the job, too. “When we’d pair them — there’s a whole process to that,” she said, laughing. “They’re not easy to hook up.”
Landa recounted this on a spring Friday from a coffee shop in Olympia. Since leaving prison in 2014, Landa has meticulously built a new life for herself. She received a bachelor’s degree this spring from Evergreen State, and will start a graduate program there in the fall. She spends a great deal of time with criminal justice advocacy work — she testified in favor of legislation that will make it easier for people to clear their criminal records — and raising her 12-year-old son, who has autism spectrum disorder.
“The inmates turned into conservation heroes doing work that was badly needed, while at the same time showing their kids, their parents, and society that they had value.”
Landa has become something of a poster child for SPP (she’s a member of its advisory panel). While incarcerated, she performed the tedious recordkeeping and observation essential to accurate science and lasting conservation. Post release, she has leveraged those skills to build a better life and stay out of prison; a feat in itself as, nationally, three-quarters of released prisoners are incarcerated again within five years.
Since its inception in 2003, SPP has worked with thousands of prisoners. Its participants have played a role in rehabilitating distressed ecosystems, reducing prisons’ carbon footprints, and keeping species from slipping into extinction. Its founders and partner organizations have started similar programs across the West. By assisting with science and conservation, administrators say, these inmates are better prepared to reenter society when their sentences end.
“They are developing networks and connections with people who work in different science and environmental careers, and they receive information on how to pursue those pathways,” said Kelli Bush, co-director of SPP.
But SPP’s most valuable component may be its simplest: It fundamentally changes the in-prison experience for its participants. When Landa, for instance, was working in the butterfly greenhouse, her duties required her to focus on the living creature at hand. And the setting — a glass-walled greenhouse in a rural forest — soothed her.
“There were times it was so quiet, and we would get to see the sunrise. It was all woods, and the sun would come through the trees,” Landa said. “That’s a big factor. Every day, for seven, eight hours a day, we were able to leave the prison and what can be a toxic environment. … It was like a whole different world out there.”
Nalini Nadkarni, a forest ecologist at the University of Utah, has long sought to foster connections between nature and those who experience far too little of it. Over decades researching forest canopies, Nadkarni had witnessed the ravages of deforestation, and building public awareness became a mission of hers.
“I don’t really like talking to policymakers. … They sort of turn my stomach, to be honest,” she said. “But I’m an extrovert, I love talking about what I learn, and [as] a brown woman climbing trees with mountain-climbing gear, [it’s] pretty easy to get people’s attention.”
Nadkarni — one of those rare individuals able to turn a childhood passion into an adult career — has an infectious love of trees. She’s an engaging speaker who doesn’t overwhelm with jargon, and thus was able to work her way into realms scientists typically shun. Over the years she allied with faith-based groups to link healthy forests with spirituality, worked with artists to choreograph tree-inspired dances, and hired musicians to write rap songs about forests for inner-city kids who may have never seen a forest.
Back in 2003, Nadkarni was working at the Evergreen State College. She had grown concerned that the horticulture trade would decimate the Northwest’s wild tree moss, which takes decades to regenerate, so she wondered if it could be farmed. But that’s a slow process requiring workers with time on their hands, and she wanted ones who typically lacked access to the outdoors.
Nadkarni thought inmates were good candidates, so she went to prisons and started asking around. She found a willing partner in Dan Pacholke, then superintendent at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a small minimum-security prison nestled in a state forest near Olympia. The prison was steeped in forest culture already; many of its inmates logged the surrounding forest, worked at the in-house sawmill, or fought wildfires. Plus, Pacholke was already in the process of creating a sustainability plan, and thought Nadkarni’s work would fit in nicely.
They ran the moss program for a time, only to find that commercial farming was not viable. But Nadkarni noticed the inmates were quite interested in the science, so she proposed bringing in colleagues for occasional lectures; Pacholke signed on.
One of the first lectures was about composting, and Pacholke thought it sounded like a good way to reduce the prison’s waste. He designated an area for a compost pile, and picked an inmate to run it. None of them had any experience composting, but Pacholke let the inmate experiment. They did some quick research on the internet, and then started mixing wood chips from the sawmill with the kitchen’s food scraps.
“We’d give [the inmate] some thermometers and stuff, and just started watching it,” Pacholke said. “And, holy shit, this thing works.”
Food waste, and the associated costs, plummeted. With help from Nadkarni and others at Evergreen State, organic gardens, beekeeping, and more soon followed. Washington’s Department of Corrections and Evergreen State formalized SPP in 2008.
The project has since swelled to include all 12 state prisons in Washington, which host more than 190 programs that partner with agencies including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Washington’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, as well as conservation organizations like the Oregon and Woodland Park zoos. Some inmates train dogs or raise sheep. Others rear endangered species, while some grow the rare and native plants those species, and countless others, need to survive.
“All these things could ripple across the country and save money, and at the same time give some therapeutic activity to the inmate population.”
SPP’s programs expanded outside the state, too. It was an early partner in the Sagebrush in Prisons Project, which today grows sagebrush in six Great Basin states that the Bureau of Land Management uses to rehabilitate degraded sage-grouse habitat. In 2011, Nadkarni left Evergreen State for Utah, where she founded INSPIRE, which facilitates similar conservation projects for the incarcerated and is building a robust lecture series. Nadkarni’s vision is to eventually form lasting partnerships between prisons and NASA and other federal science agencies.
Programs like gardening and composting are fine, Nadkarni said from her Utah lab, but SPP’s expansion into conservation work is what truly sparked the project’s growth. “Suddenly, it was like the whole thing flipped,” she said. “The inmates turned into conservation heroes doing work that was badly needed … while at the same time showing their kids and their parents and society that they had value.”
The grounds at Stafford Creek Corrections Center, a 1,900-bed, mixed-security facility outside Aberdeen, Washington, are punctuated by immaculate gardens. Deep furrows in rich soil, leafy greens, and perimeter flowerbeds break up an otherwise homogeneous landscape of concrete and pavement. There’s not a weed in sight. The first garden was planted in 2011, and remains tended solely by those serving life sentences. Now a large garden sits outside each housing unit.
Perhaps no facility has adopted SPP programs with the fervor of Stafford Creek. On the day I visited, I spent most of my time inside well-maintained greenhouses that defied my conception of a prison facility altogether. Out in the prison’s central yard, tens of thousands of rare seedlings are grown, destined for the last native prairie strongholds around Puget Sound. Gardens, 25,000 square feet of them, yielded 18 tons of produce for the local food bank last year — a point of pride for the gardeners.
An inmate named Rory (we’re identifying current inmates by their first names for privacy reasons) took pride knowing his vegetables were feeding local children experiencing homelessness. “Whenever I’m out here doing stuff I might not like, like harvesting on a rainy day or something, I just think about playing a role in helping those kids out,” he said.
This notion — giving inmates purpose-driven work that also benefits the surrounding communities — is one reason SPP has enjoyed support from DOC higher-ups. “They have an opportunity to give back to society in general, and it happens in a lot of ways,” said Stephen Sinclair, secretary of Washington’s Department of Corrections and SPP’s co-director.
It’s a model Pacholke, who also served as DOC secretary and is now a consultant, believes can scale around the nation. “I think there’s potential to meet regional geographic needs as it relates to endangered species, bees, rare and endangered prairie plants. There’s potential to save on potable water, to save on waste,” he said. “All these things could ripple across the country and save money, and at the same time give some therapeutic activity to the inmate population.”
In the gardens, Rory and Dale, another inmate, discussed that therapeutic aspect. They like seeing birds and snakes in an otherwise bleak landscape, watching seedlings pop up in the spring, and fielding questions from curious inmates who pass by. As they stood over an enormous compost bin filled with food scraps and shredded paper, Rory stirred the worms that break it all down to nutrient-rich compost. He said this work gives him a boost of self-esteem. Inmates come to prison with a blatant understanding that they’ve failed society in some fashion, but gardening every day and helping to feed the community, Rory said, communicated that he was reliable.
For all of this work, however, SPP workers make 42 cents an hour and cap out at $55 a month. The issue of prison labor invites criticism to SPP from two sides. On one end are the people wholly opposed to low inmate wages. Kelly Peterson, Stafford Creek’s sustainability manager who oversees all SPP programs, was unable to launch a tiny-homes project, in part, because a nonprofit partner was opposed to working with prisoners who are paid so little. But such low costs invite others to embrace the program purely from a cost-saving perspective.
“People misunderstand and are thinking, Oh great, here’s an opportunity to get some free labor,” Bush, SPP’s co-director, said. “That doesn’t work for us. That’s not why we’re doing this work.”
But current and former inmates I spoke to said both kinds of criticism are misguided. Yes, they’d like to be paid prevailing wages (inmate pay is set by state lawmakers), but they also don’t want the jobs they value to disappear.
Sentencing requirements are changed, diversion programs are set up, expungement laws are passed. But SPP represents a shift in the idea of what prisons can be, and what prisoners deserve.
On the day I visited Stafford Creek, two inmates, Josh and Joseph, were manning an enormous aquaponics system that grows wetland grasses. Ten thousand gallons of water recirculated through huge tanks; the air was thick with the marshy atmosphere and with noise from droning pumps. Josh walked me through the process of how waste from 100 large koi and a few goldfish is turned, with the help of select bacteria, into a solution rich with nitrogen. That water is then pumped into 4,000 square feet of plastic-lined trays filled with sedge and rush grasses critical to the Oregon spotted frog, a threatened species the USFWS has enlisted SPP to help protect. The grass is sown into coconut-fiber mats; once mature, it’s planted in restoration plots across Oregon and Washington. In 2018, SPP produced 111 such mats.
“[The grass helps] return wetlands back to their native state,” Josh told me. “Which is good for everything — that includes salmon habitat.”
He speaks with authority about the project because he has some. The inmates in SPP have either long histories of good behavior or are nearing release, so it’s a pretty selective crowd, but the leeway they’re given is nonetheless surprising. “We aren’t told what we’re going to do every day,” Joseph, the aquaponics technician, said. Carl Elliott, SPP’s conservation nursery manager, gives them a task and a deadline, and they take it from there. “We know exactly what we’re doing, and we handle what we need.”
“It’s really kind of liberating,” Josh added.
While some inmates do enter science or conservation careers post-release, putting that deep knowledge they gain about particular subjects to use, the job-related benefits of SPP extend well beyond the scientific. Take Landa, the former butterfly shepherd. She’s not going into ecology — she’s seeking a master’s of public administration — but SPP, she said, equipped her with some oh-so-important intangibles: accountability, attention to detail, and a social network.
Early in her incarceration, Landa decided she wanted to go to college upon release, but roadblocks familiar to the formerly incarcerated quickly emerged. “With a criminal background, it becomes such a hardship to get so many things — housing, employment,” she said. “Having a criminal background is like a life sentence.”
More than her knowledge of butterflies, informal connections got Landa on her feet. After she was released, an intern at SPP helped her with college and scholarship applications. Once admitted to Evergreen State, Landa had to move to Olympia, and finding housing with a criminal record and a special-needs child isn’t easy; Elliott, however, knew a landlord willing to give her a shot.
In these ways, SPP is oriented toward benefits outside prison walls. Inmates’ work helps conservation projects, many on public land, and the skills they acquire are meant to help them establish fulfilling lives after release. But proponents of SPP routinely cite one aspect of this work that fundamentally changes an inmate’s experience while they’re still behind bars.
“When you bring science and nature into your system, you increase the humanity of the system,” Sinclair, the DOC secretary, said. “[Prison is] all concrete, pavement, brick buildings, walled perimeters. That puts your mind in a certain state — you definitely feel like a captive. And so, when you start introducing nature into the equation, and allow people to interact with and watch things grow … it changes your attitude. It puts you in a different place. And that’s whether you’re incarcerated or working.”
Therein lies an important element of SPP’s focus. Even though most inmates won’t go on to careers in environmental sciences — and some won’t leave at all — bringing nature and environmental discussions inside prison walls expands an inmate’s conception of the world beyond the aesthetically sterile environment where they live.
“We’re in a place where so many aspects are dehumanizing,” said Cyril, one of the inmate instructors of Roots of Success, a 12-week, peer-led course that focuses on environmental literacy and self-sufficiency. Everything from interactions with officers to portrayals of inmates in the media, Cyril said, can chip away at an inmate’s self worth.
But the environment is something bigger than any one person, something we all share. “People are able to realize, I am a person, I am a man, I have a family … I am connected to the environment, I do breathe the same air that my neighbor breathes,” Cyril said. “It goes from being a selfish thing, to a social thing, to an environmental thing.”
While in Washington, Nadkarni had a hunch that even an artificial nature experience could help the most nature-deprived people in society: those held in solitary confinement. But she couldn’t find a facility willing to let her experiment until 2013, when the Snake River Correctional Institution in Oregon decided to give her idea a try.
Nadkarni and her team set up a playlist of nature videos that would be displayed for an hour a day in a solitary cell. After a year, 43 percent of inmates surveyed reported feeling calmer and less irritable after watching the videos. Violent behavior among those exposed to nature imagery was down 26 percent compared with the control group.
Nadkarni’s results were consistent with a growing pile of research espousing nature’s benefits to the human psyche. Subjects in one study experienced decreased stress hormones and lower blood pressure after spending just 30 minutes in a forest. A 90-minute nature walk is associated with decreased activity in the area of the brain associated with depression. After three days backpacking, subjects of another experiment performed 50 percent better on problem-solving tests.
Testimony from inmates and DOC administrators suggests these effects are being felt in Washington prisons, too. Ron Haynes, Stafford Creek’s superintendent, believes the SPP programs calm inmates and make the prison safer; inmates, for their part, don’t want to commit infractions that would revoke their ability to grow plants or work with animals.
“It’s remarkable. The interactions between staff and incarcerated individuals just kinda changes,” Sinclair said. “It’s more positive — not posturing and basic prison culture.”
Before Kelly Peterson started running Stafford Creek’s sustainability projects in 2017, she was a corrections officer for 21 years. She started working at the prison when it opened in 2000, a time when violence was more common, and officers and inmates had hostile relationships.
“Inmates would walk by us standing on the bridgeway and spit at our feet,” Peterson told me over lunch at Stafford Creek. “They would be much more reactive, abusive verbally, quick to respond, to lash out. But one thing I noticed: staff that treated them with respect … got a lot farther than those that just hammered the rules.”
Peterson was initially skeptical of SPP programs. “When Roots of Success started, I never in a million years thought it’d work. I thought they’d be smuggling contraband,” she said. But after anarchy failed to materialize, she realized these programs aligned with her personal view of corrections, which hinged on a “mutual-respect environment.” She also noticed that, seemingly across the facility, the power differential between inmates and officers was less obvious, and tension de-escalated accordingly. The science lessons interested her just as they did the inmates, and she watched as they were inspired to learn more about biology, conservation, atmospheric science, and more.
“It changes the balance in their life and it gives them the confidence they didn’t have before,” she said. “It opens up their world: ‘Hey, I can be better than what I am.’”
Self improvement has, for decades, not been the purview of American criminal justice. More than 1.5 million people are currently incarcerated in U.S. prisons, and the ethos behind the facilities has long been punitive. Infractions and extreme mental illness are often responded to with solitary confinement. A recent Department of Justice investigation into Alabama’s prisons showed that basic health care and safety are not guaranteed for inmates, nor for guards. Some argue that murderers, rapists, drug runners and the like shouldn’t have the opportunity to tend a garden or hear birdsong. If you don’t like prison, the logic goes, you shouldn’t have broken the law.
But the consequences of this stance extend beyond incarceration when prisoners find it difficult to gain employment, housing, and other resources necessary to build a life after serving their time, which contributes to sky-high recidivism rates. All this is expensive, too: The Prison Policy Initiative estimates incarceration in the U.S. costs $182 billion every year.
“While policymakers, the public, and our reform allies now express dissatisfaction with the overwhelming costs … of the current system of incarceration, reform efforts have tended to focus on stanching the flow into our system of mass incarceration,” Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, wrote in a 2018 report. “We must, however, also evaluate our prison practices and include a critical re-envisioning of the purpose and experience of incarceration.”
As Turner writes, prison reform is often focused on things happening outside of prison itself. Sentencing requirements are changed, diversion programs are set up, expungement laws are passed. But SPP represents a shift in the idea of what prisons can be, and what prisoners deserve.
“Coming to the system is the punishment,” Sinclair said. Critics who believe inmates deserve the most austere surroundings, he said, are shortsighted.
“They don’t recognize the fact that over 95 percent of the individuals in any correctional system are going to transition back out into the community,” he continued. “You have a choice: Trying to build somebody up who’s going to come back out as a better person, or do nothing … and let people sit.”
Those who aren’t coming out, though, benefit from these programs as well.
After lunch, Peterson and I visited one of the garden greenhouses tended by two more inmates, Joe and Toby. Joe — bald, barrel-chested, goateed — showed me his own aquaponics system. Unlike the huge operation at the other end of the prison, this one was designed not for wetland plants, but for red-leaf lettuce and tomatoes. He explained his creation with a tinkerer’s enthusiasm. Pretty much everything was scrap material — the plants floated on glued-together pieces of styrofoam — and there were some mechanical hiccups; six of his early fish were sucked into the pump housing. But his creation was working.
“We just put the tomato plants in, and they’re already taking over,” Joe said as he lifted out a plant with foot-long roots trailing behind.
Joe is serving a life sentence; the potential reentry benefits of SPP aren’t applicable to him. But the program, he said, still serves immense value. “Most of my life, I’ve stripped away from society. [So] what can I do that is positive in this environment?” he said. Growing produce for a local food bank gives him pride, and he hopes the aquaponics experiment allows him to grow even more. “And then, I’m teaching other men about this system. So when they go back into their communities, they can feed their families.”
At another greenhouse, he and Toby had rigged up a temperature-sensitive actuator that would automatically open vents on hot days like this one. They had tiered tomatoes and cucumbers in planters so the two could share nutrients. They were constantly tweaking their systems, year after year, to maximize yields.
“[SPP] started a whole new conversation at Stafford Creek,” Toby said. “Typically in prison, it’s a pretty narrow field of conversation. … Being able to change the conversation a little bit to environmental improvement, personal improvement, nutritional improvement, is a nice twist.”
For Joe and Toby, the value of taking part in something not only positive, but also interesting, during their time in prison is manifest when they speak with family members. “As prisoners living this closed-in life, you typically want to live vicariously through them,” Toby said. “But we do so much cool stuff, they want to know what we’re doing in here.
“We’re very,” he paused, grimacing at the irony, “I guess, lucky in that respect.”
