Surrounded by concrete buildings and barbed-wire-topped fences, the Utah State Prison garden is a man-made oasis. Blooming flowers fill the greenhouses, vines creep over arbors and fruit trees dot the landscape.
Nearby, 90,000 square feet of vegetables grow, promising fresh produce for the prison and for the community. This year, members of the Green Thumb Project expect to donate as much as 40,000 pounds of tomatoes, corn, squash, cabbage and almost every other vegetable imaginable to the Utah Food Bank.Glenn Spencer, who serves a humanitarian mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, believes the prison project will make a huge difference to people in need of basics like food. He hopes other people will follow the prisoners' example and donate fresh vegetables to those who would go without.
Retired nurseryman Elmer Knowles started teaching horticulture at the prison more than 35 years ago. The result is Green Thumb, with 11 full-time employees and about 35 seasonal workers who help program supervisor Rick McDaniel, a state Department of Corrections employee. Besides the fruits and vegetables, they raise a variety of house and exotic plants they trade to four area nurseries for equipment and supplies. The prison will "pay" the going rate for the produce, allowing the money to go into the garden project, instead of having to buy the food elsewhere.
Rikk Ricci, a former landscaper, volunteered with the program for two years and has been a paid member of the team for the past three years. He and fellow inmate Roger Brechlin are responsible for much of the area's design.
When the prison finishes a project and has extra concrete, it calls Ricci. He sets up the forms, and another sidewalk goes in. Nothing is wasted, according to Steve
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Stilling, an inmate volunteer rather than a paid member of the program. Stilling said his role is to "dabble cheerfully in all of it."
"We're cheap," Ricci laughed, pointing to a twig he promises will soon bloom and sell somewhere in Salt Lake City. "As you can see, we can make a dead stick grow. We'll always take a cutting before we'll buy a seed."
Dave Sheppard is the "key" inmate behind the garden project. He has more than five years' time in the garden, and he knows how to make vegetables grow.
Inmate Kent Beckstrom's specialty is painting, building and providing other support services to maintain the greenhouses.
Together, the project produces so many plants that McDaniel makes two or three trips a week to the nurseries, where he unloads the bounty from 20-foot, 2-ton commissary trucks. The prison crew also trades blooms for trees from State Lands and Forestry. They hope to grow 2,000 pines so they can donate one to each of the schools in the state to celebrate Utah's bicentennial.
It provides a valuable service to the community, according to Capt. Mark Roberts, Inmate Services Program coordinator. But the real payoff is watching the men grow, developing skills and self-esteem. "It changes them," he said. "A lot of them get jobs in nurseries when they get out - good jobs where they're supervisors because they know what they're doing."
If anyone doubts it, Ricci will set him straight. The prison garden, he said, has one of the lowest recidivism rates. About 95 percent of the men get jobs in horticulture when they're released from prison. And they never look back.