The Garden Project

Whole Earth, Winter, 1998 by Cathrine Sneed

The third part of our program is the Tree Corps, which was started as a way to deal with the fact that in Bayview-Hunters Point, and in other places in San Francisco, we have streets with no trees. None. When we plant the trees it makes a difference because the neighbors, the people that live in the community, see people who need jobs. So, the vandalism rate for our trees is actually much lower than for the trees that the City plants. When the trees survive, that tells me that what we're doing works. Also it works because it puts people to work. It's letting Paradise's father and other people bring a check home every week instead of relying on welfare or drug sales to survive.

More than all three of these things, what I'm trying to do is help people to see what's happening in our jails and in our prisons. I'm not alone in this. A lot of people have done this all over the country. As citizens we are allowing our government to spend an amazing amount of money to keep people, mostly people of color, in jail for the crime of being poor. There has to be a time where we say as a community that in order to heal our community we need to involve the people who have hurt the community.

The other day a man that I've known from the jail for the last fifteen or so years came to our office. I hadn't seen him in ten years. I started telling him how the program had changed from the time when we worked in the jail. "So what's up with you? How's your family?" "Well, I don't see my family anymore," he said. "My son died in San Quentin in a gang fight." I remembered his son. I said, "But I haven't seen you in ten years. Where have you been?" He said, "Oh, I've been in and out. I've been to State Prison, back and forth. I'm still not off parole." So, in ten years this man has been on the street probably a total of three months and then he's back. James' crime is being addicted to crack. That's his crime. I'm not a mathematician, but it seems like a lot of money to send James back and forth to State Prison for ten years. We're talking $25,000 or more each year, when you calculate what being in jail does to the family that's involved. There's no one bringing any money home. Most of the children I know whose parents have been to jail end up in jail themselves. The cycle just continues.

This cycle is spinning out of control and bringing more and more communities into it while we pay for it. At some point we have to say this doesn't make sense, and stop it. At some point we have to look at the fact that there are children who aren't eating in America. They're not eating food. They're eating garbage. These same children are going to grow up, and when they grow up I'll bet you many of them will follow the path of their parents. They'll be addicted to drugs.

In California we spend more on prisons than we do on our schools. That is criminal. We're wasting our money, we're wasting our energy, and we're misdirected when we think that the problem of crime is the problem of people of color going awry. That's not what's happening. What's happening is that the young men and young women in our jails and prisons are there mostly because they're addicts and because they're poor. And if we can't do anything about that, then we won't restore the earth. We need to restore the people first.