Orange jumpsuits and green thumbs

When Sergeant Benson and the Law & Order SVU squad send perps to Rikers Island in the Bronx, nobody ever mentions the Farm Program or the Greenhouse Project, two horticultural initiatives available to minimum-security inmates.  These programs include indoor classroom lessons on issues like soil science and rainwater collection, combined with outdoor, hands-on gardening skills.  Statistics suggset that only 5-10 percent of participants in these green-thumb programs are likely to reoffend, compared with 65 percent of the general prison population that do so. 

Rikers Island has actually been arable land for hundreds of years, back when Dutch resident Abraham Riker had his family farm on the site and crops and livestock thrived.  In the period after the Civil War, prisoners from the jam-packed jail on Roosevelt Island would be brought over to the “Municipal Farm” to tend the vegetable patches and the piggery. 

In 1884, the City formally purchased the Island from descendants of the Riker family, to begin construction on what would become the world’s largest penal colony.  By this time, parts of Rikers Island were being used as the city’s garbage dump, and clean-up operations and land stabilisation would take another 40 years to complete. 

Construction on the 413-acre Rikers Island penitentiary complex commenced in 1932, and when the prison complex opened three years later, horticulture therapy was part of inmate rehabilitation programming from the very beginning.