Jail Garden

Nutrition & Energy Working Group

The Idea of the Trauma Informed Jail started in 2020 with the start of the Nutrition Horticulture and Energy working group. This focus group was thinking deeply about the health of people as they exist within the carceral system and ways in which we could improve healthier outcomes as they transitioned back into the community. What most people don’t consider about reentry is the state in which people return to the community from incarceration and the impact of the stay.

Research

Briana Lalman and Angelina Debenedet, two previous interns for URO, conducted a food system analysis of jails and prisons across the US and what we saw was a focus on caloric intake versus a nutritional intake approach to well-being in these settings. The average cost of a meal for incarcerated individuals across the United States was a dollar and ninety cents. It was at that time that we asked ourselves:

How could our engagement around this issue assist with changing this structural behavior?

We knew that a garden developed with the intention of improving the nutritional value of what people consume would lead to shifts. Along the way we learned that deficiencies in key micro-nutrients that can only come from plants further exacerbate mental health challenges because it is the micro-nutrient deficiencies that are at the seat of the diseases they suffer from.

Partnering with the Sheriff

In August of 2023 we sat down with Tompkins County Sheriff Dereck Osborne and shared a plan to examine the food system within the jail and research ways to improve and to also restart a jail garden that had been dormant for 4 years that would have a trauma-informed, health-sustaining lens. The Sheriff agreed and said his staff could really benefit from access to better food at the jail because everything is a processed food item or it’s fried leading to unwanted weight gains for the officers. URO then went about the business of establishing a team of folks with backgrounds in gardening, medical plants and plant based medicine, orchard development.