Prisoners plant food for the hungry

Inmates at Camp Pugsley, a minimum-security state prison near Kingsley, have begun planting a 55,000-square-foot garden that will grow crops for area food banks.

Russ Marlin, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections, told Michigan Messenger that the gardening is expected to provide useful real-world skills, exercise and mental stimulation for the prisoners.

“The average minimum prison sentence in Michigan is four years,” Marlin said, “Ninety-five percent of them come out and we don’t want them to come out worse than when they came in — they are going to be our neighbors.”

“By gardening, they are creating something positive. It is restorative justice; they have inflicted harm on society and this is a way they can pay it back,” Marlin said.

Prison officials expect that several thousand pounds of strawberries, cucumbers, carrots, onions, tomatoes and other vegetables will be harvested and donated to area food pantries this year.

Continued -Duke Elsner, Michigan State University Extension agriculture educator for Grand Traverse County, will instruct the inmates in pest management and gardening techniques.

Elsner said experience with gardening programs at other prisons has shown him that inmates are often eager to learn and share information about gardening.

But he added that prison gardening requires some “special approaches.”

“When it comes to pest management, for example, due to security issues, we are going to avoid using any kind of poisons, ” he said, “Pest control will be natural, mechanical and organic.”

The Pugsley gardens are situated on very sandy soil, Elsner said, so water management will also present some novel challenges.

“They don’t want a whole lot of hoses laying around — the wardens say they are just like rope — so we are going to have to work with extreme water conservation. We may learn a lot about how to garden under water-scarcity conditions. We could learn something that would benefit everybody.”