The Informant

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.

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