Inch by inch, row by row

Gonna make this garden grow

All it takes is a rake and a hoe

And a piece of fertile ground

An old crow watching hungrily

From his perch in yonder tree.

And in my garden I’m as free

As that feathered thief up there.

David Mallett

Philip Howard grew up next to a farm in Kenduskeag but hadn’t done any gardening since he was child. Over the past month, the Penobscot County Jail inmate unearthed long-forgotten skills tending a vegetable garden at the Curran Homestead in Orrington.

Howard, 29, of Old Town was sentenced May 22 in Penobscot County Superior Court to four months in Penobscot County Jail for assault, furnishing alcohol to a minor and drunken driving.

The inmate is one of about 30 who have planted, weeded, hoed and harvested from the 1-acre plot that is a joint project for the jail and the farm located about eight miles from downtown Bangor on Fields Pond Road.

In addition to being outdoors, the inmates eat fresh vegetables several times a week and earn time off their sentences, according to Sheriff Glenn Ross. For every 16 hours an inmate works in the garden, his sentence is reduced by 24 hours.

“It’s work,” said Shawn Myers, 21, of Old Town as he hoed the moist earth between neat rows of lettuce. “It’s better than being inside looking at four walls, and the broccoli we grew is really good.”

Myers is serving a six-month sentence for theft.

“I like being outside,” he added. “It gives me a chance to think about stuff when there’s not a whole lot of people around.”

The jail has had a working relationship with the Curran Homestead for several years, Ross said recently. Inmates have helped restore the barn, house and other buildings as part of the jail’s community service program, which provides free labor for nonprofit organizations.

“The Curran farm would not exist if not for this program,” said Wayne Killam, caretaker of the property. “Seventy percent of the restoration here has been done by inmate helpers over the past few years.”

He called the garden project, which took root earlier this year, a win-win for everyone involved.

“The overflow production can be sold at our farm stand and the jail gets fresh vegetables,” Killam said.

“It also allows us to fulfill the provision of Mrs. [Mary Katherine] Curran’s will, which said the property was to be a working farm in pristine condition unencumbered by a mortgage.”

Curran died in 1991 and the Curran Homestead Project, a nonprofit, was formed to re-create the turn-of-the-century farm that would provide educational opportunities for visitors to experience the culture and lifestyle of rural Maine. The garden project helps fulfill that goal, according to Killam, 53, who lives at the farm.

To participate in the program, PCJ inmates must be classified as low security risks and qualify to be inmate helpers, formerly called trusties. That allows them to leave the facility with Robert Mowdy, an employee of Volunteers of America, rather than a jail guard or sheriff’s deputy, and keeps the cost of the program down.

The major cost to the jail is transporting three or four inmates and their supervisor the 16-mile round trip three days a week. So far, one of the big benefits to the jail has been fresh produce, much of it cooked by inmate Walter Wilhelm, 52, of Bangor.

Wilhelm, who is nearing the end of a 10-month sentence for assault, has spent 30 years working as a cook in hotels around the country. He has used those skills while in jail.

“Before this summer, we had frozen or canned vegetables,” he said while trimming leaves from cauliflower and broccoli picked the previous day. “They aren’t as good. Fresh vegetables are better for you.”

Wilhelm insists on steaming the fresh produce because boiling vegetables cooks out the vitamins and nutrients.

“I’ve had no complaints about how they taste,” he said.

Jail administrators don’t yet know how much money having the garden will save in food costs, but they are keeping track. In an effort to keep costs down, Mowdy’s salary is paid from the inmates’ funds rather than the jail’s operating budget.

The fund comes from surcharges that inmates pay on phone calls and items purchased at the commissary. Mowdy does not work directly for the jail but is employed by Volunteers of America, an organization that contracts with the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office to provide pre- and post-trial monitoring programs.

Mowdy, 60, of Bradford is best known as a furniture maker, but has gardened for many years and was an early member of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. He also conducts Bible study programs at the Piscataquis County Jail in Dover-Foxcroft.

Like many Penobscot County gardeners, the inmates planted cabbages, lettuce, carrots, beans, tomatoes, beets, turnips, onions, peppers and cucumbers along with basil, cilantro and dill. The jail garden was planted late because of an unusually wet spring.

The radishes came in first and were so plentiful some inmates vowed never to eat one again, Mowdy joked. The rows and rows of sweet corn were consumed by hungry crows.

“But we’re doing a good job of keeping ahead of the weeds,” he said.

The garden may be a new project for PCJ, but, historically, correctional facilities were expected to be self-supporting. A century ago, nearly every prison and jail had a garden. Many also raised dairy and beef cattle. A few still do.

The Maine Department of Corrections operates the Bolduc Correctional Facility in Warren, which since the early 1930s has functioned as the farm for the state prisons. In addition to providing staples such as potatoes and dried beans, up to three head of beef cattle are slaughtered each year, according to information on the department’s Web site.

At least one other Maine jail has a garden.

Since 2001, inmates at Kennebec County Jail have farmed on a 15-acre community garden off Cony Road in Augusta, the Bangor Daily News reported last year. Three teams of 15 inmates work every day on the plot that has grown substantially since its first year when it was just an acre – the same size as the PCJ garden.

The 2005 harvest there offset $8,000 in jail kitchen purchases, augmenting 600 meals served daily at the jail in the state capital. In addition to seasonal vegetables, inmates in Augusta also plant a large plot with potatoes, and 8,000 pounds of that crop were donated two years ago to more than 10 Kennebec County area soup kitchens and shelters.

Nancy Oden of Jonesboro has advocated that the combined state prison and county jail being discussed for Hancock County include an organic farm where inmates would grow their own food and learn survival skills.

Physicians and horticulturists have documented the physical and mental benefits of gardening in recent years. Statistics on whether having inmates work in a garden reduces recidivism have been harder to come by.

James Jiler, who directs the GreenHouse project, a horticultural job-training program for male and female inmates at New York City’s Rikers Island jail system, claims in his book “Doing Time in the Garden” that the return rate for participants in the gardening program is 15 percent compared with 65 percent for the general prison population at Rikers.

Jiler’s program, however, involves more than simply growing vegetables and using horticulture as therapy to help them “cope with issues in their lives such as anger, traumatic stress, substance abuse and depression,” he writes in his book. “[The] programs take vocational training a step further, incorporating an eclectic mix of garden therapy, science and English literacy, life skills development and job enrichment with programs for job placement once a student has served his or her sentence.”

There are no plans to expand the PCJ program to include job training, Ross said, but the garden will be larger next season. Mowdy hopes to stay involved.

“It gets the guys outside and gives them a chance to think about what they’ve been doing,” Mowdy said. “When I work beside them, we get to talk a lot about what’s important, so they can steer clear of jail.”

And that is the goal of every correctional facility whether or not the inmates have a garden to weed.