Women Find Healing, Gowth in Hawaiian Prison Garden

From Canadian Business.

"For the first time in Maile Bent's life, she feels a connection to her Native Hawaiian ancestry. She feels it in the soil in her hands, caked into her fingernails, while gardening under the sun on the Windward side of Oahu.

"There's a lot of spiritual healing here," she said after taking a bite out of a guava picked from a tree she helped grow with 11 other women.

While Bent and the other women are busy pulling weeds, watering plants or harvesting produce, a guard is constantly hovering. The women are inmates at the Women's Community Correctional Center — Hawaii's only female prison.

Bent, 42, originally from the Big Island, never thought much about what it means to part Hawaiian, until she started learning about the land and how it can provide nourishment, just as it has for centuries for Hawaiians. "There's a sense of freedom down here."

She is serving a five-year sentence for drug possession. For now, freedom is a few hours, several days a week while participating in the gardening and farming program for minimum- and medium-security prisoners with good behavior.

The program is among three similar ones at Hawaii correctional facilities. Inmates at Oahu's Waiawa Correctional Facility, a minimum-security men's prison, and inmates at a jail on Kauai farm produce that's consumed in prison and jail cafeterias. The Waiawa inmates also grow fish, but because prisoners aren't allowed to eat anything with bones, the fish are given to a community college's culinary program, said Toni Schwartz, spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety.

The first time Kimberly Enos smelled a water lily was while incarcerated. The fragrant flower is a marked change from the life the 36-year-old mother of three daughters led before she began serving a 20-year sentence for meth trafficking two years ago. She'll be eligible for parole in three years.

"Money and drugs, everything was based around that," she said, showing off a taro patch she tends to. "I look forward to waking up every day now."

All the women in the group talk about the healing qualities of growing things as they readied for a weekend plant sale. Potted plants, flowers and herbs the women grow are sold every year at Kailua Elementary School to raise money to keep the program running. Materials and volunteers for the program are provided by Lanikai Outdoor Circle, a community environmental group. The only expenses for the prison are the guard who keeps a close eye on the women and the cost of water, said Milton Kotsubo, the prison's warden. Only 12 from the 230-women facility can participate.

Inmates started a nursery in 2000 in a remote corner of the women's prison property. Three years ago they began using hydroponics, the latest trend in gardening and farming. Overall, the prison farms provide about 25 percent of produce consumed by inmates, resulting in only negligible savings, Schwartz said: "If we could expand it, it would be a different story."

The impact on the women goes deeper. The way Lilian Hussein explains it is that growing things "symbolizes our life." Planting, she said, is about finding the root of her problems and starting over.

"I planted all these ti leaves from they were just little stems," said Hussein, 43, marveling at the long, dark green plants.

Bent sees similarities between planting and motherhood. A mother of four, she gave birth to her youngest daughter, now 6, during a previous stint in the prison. She vows her current sentence will be the last.

As Cathleen Freitas quickly harvested rows of hydroponically grown lettuce, she said it still amazes her that the leafy buds were just seeds 30 days earlier. Hydroponics, she explained, involves growing things in water with fertilizer. After the lettuce was put into bins, she checked on the progress of a giant composting pile creating nutrient-rich soil that will be used for their next planting.

The skills she's learning now, since pleading guilty to identity theft, are similar "to the kinds of skills I had that were unhealthy." It took unique skill to forge checks and gauge which bank teller would be the most likely to cash a bad check, she said.

Now putting her energy into gardening, Freitas, 37, said, "keeps me from dwelling on issues like shame and guilt."

Annetta Kinnicutt, a volunteer with Lanikai Outdoor Circle, has watched participants of the program wrestle with their inner demons. After the women leave the facility, she stays in touch with them.

"We try to be really patient," she said. "It's healing for me, too, to be a gardener."

Hussein is set to leave the prison soon because she's eligible for work furlough on Oct. 15. She's served six years for 56 counts of identity theft and forgery. Her sentence had been 20 years, but was reduced after she appealed and prevailed.

"I've gained a lot of job skills here," she said. "Maybe I can work at a hydroponics place."

I see the women are also finding hope there.