The Informant

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

San Quentin State Prison

On Saturday morning, I went to an event at San Quentin State Prison whose title surprised me when I first saw it: “Green Career Fair.” I’m putting together a radio story on the fair, but just as a preview, one of my first questions was, “do you know what a green job is?” I, for one, don’t really, and a lot of the inmates didn’t seem to. Combine the idea of elusive “green” with “prison,” a testosterone-laced, sunless place, and the whole concept just seems stranger by the minute. But little did I know, San Quentin has long had an eco undercurrent: Kevin Good of Sun’s Free Solar, one of the companies at the fair, told me that Prison Industries–which operates inmate-staffed manufacturing plants–has long had an industrial recycling program at San Quentin. About 10 years ago, Good says he pulled his truck up to the prison gates and dropped off an old mattress that was then (presumably) deconstructed for its materials.

Many of the inmates I talked to also had a serious eco conscience, which seemed to have been cultivated in another one of San Quentin’s programs, the Insight Garden Program. Insight helps inmates maintain an organic flower garden in a corner of the prison’s H-Unit yard, where medium-security inmates who live in massive dorms spend a lot of their time. They’re also working on approval for an organic veggie garden. A lot of inmates at the fair who were part of the program seemed to look to the garden as a connection to little things, activities, and pleasures that are daily components of free life, but don’t exist in prison. Like freshness, colors, sweet smells, soil, and even quiet.

Increasing attention is going towards programs like these that make prisons less cold, concrete, and generally prison-like, as a way to help inmates keep mentally and emotionally connected to the world. Take these examples from a report by the American Correctional Association:

• A jail in Boulder, Colorado and a state prison in Kansas ditched old fluorescent lighting for incandescent bulbs and natural lighting through windows and skylights.
• Mississippi’s Agricultural Enterprise program, which grows vegetables and raises live-stock, employs 374 inmates and provides fresh food for prisons.
• And then what could be less carceral than this solicitation for donations of fish tanks from a prison in Oregon: “The inmates have been experimenting with raising their own crickets and have had some success, but in order to feed 85 rapidly growing Oregon spotted frogs they need to expand their raising capacity.”

So it seems that the green job fair at San Quentin, while the first of its kind in a California state prison, was less of an anomaly, and more like a natural step from what’s been building for a while.