Prisons Go Green with Organic Farming, Composting, Recycling
November 4, 2008 · Print This Article
A beekeeper carefully tends his honeybees, while in the background, a man in an orange suit stirs compost with a pitchfork. Three more men are bent over in the garden, pulling weeds and checking on the tomatoes. It would be an idyllic scene, if not for the presence of towering chain-link fences and guards with guns. This isn’t a rural farm; it’s a prison.
Cedar Creek Corrections Center in southwest Washington grew 8,000 pounds of organic veggies this year, composted 100% of their food scraps and even recycled shoe scraps into playground turf. Inmates at this minimum-security prison get fresh air and exercise, and the prison saves money by implementing practically every green initiative they can think of.
From MSNBC:
“It reduces cost, reduces our damaging impact on the environment, engages inmates as students,” said Eldon Vail, secretary of the Washington Department of Corrections, which oversees 15 prisons and 18,000 offenders. “It’s good security.”
As around-the-clock operations, prisons are voracious resource hogs, and administrators are under increasing pressure to reduce waste and conserve energy and water.
In 2007, states spent more than $49 billion to feed, house, clothe, treat and supervise 2.3 million offenders, the Pew Center on the States reported this year.
Cedar Creek is far from the only prison to be using sustainability to their financial advantage. The Indiana Department of Corrections installed water boilers that run on wood chips and built a wind turbine that generates about 10 kilowatts per hour. Ironwood State Prison in Blythe, CA has 6,200 solar panels that feed energy back into the grid, and North Carolina’s Department of Corrections had inmates turn 50-gallon pickle barrels into rain cisterns.
What a smart idea – with as much money as states spend on prisons, this is a huge help in so many ways. Why not take it a step further, and train inmates for green collar jobs? Of course, we’d like to see law-abiding citizens get that opportunity first, but it’s an idea for the future.
Link [MSNBC]
- Green Prison Coordinator
- Humanity For Prisoners, by william newmiller
- Volunteer Litigation Fellowship - National Prison Project
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This is totally awesome – they not only are saving costs, but I can only imagine the theraputic benefits for the prisoners, and how this would help them move beyond whatever experience rbought them there in the first place. So much more engaging then most prison life.