Doing Time in the Garden: Life Lessons through Prison Horticulture - Hardcover

James Jiler is Director of the Greenhouse Project, a renowned horticultural job-training program for inmates at New York City's Rikers Island jail system. He provides instruction in horticulture and greenhouse management integrated with a math, science and English literacy curriculum. Jiler also oversees job placement and after-care services for released inmates while directing the GreenTeam.

JAMES JILER offers an engaging personal account of running a highly successful horticultural job-training program at Rikers Island, the largest jail complex in the United States. Doing Time in the Garden features curriculum and practical strategies for rehabilitation through in-prison GreenHouse and post-release GreenTeam programs run by the Horticultural Society of New York. It is the only book that shows firsthand how vocational education and meaningful employment in gardening can reduce recidivism.

This elegant book tells an inspirational story of a horticultural program in a most unlikely location, New York City's forbidding jail complex on Rikers Island. On one level, the book documents a unique collaboration between The Horticultural Society of New York and the City's Department of Correction. More important, Doing Time in the Garden will lift the spirits of those who wish to nourish tender seedlings of hope in the dark forests of our nation's retributive criminal justice policies. This story of young offenders learning to care for plants and trees in jail and then translating those skills into horticultural jobs back home points the way to similar, much needed innovations in justice.
--Jeremy Travis, President, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Former Director, The National Institute of Criminal Justice

James Jiler's book outlines perfect models of meaningful green-collar jobs training. This is restorative economics at its best--the surest path to safe streets and peaceful communities.
--Van Jones, Executive Director, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Oakland, California

Doing Time in the Garden makes a powerful statement for the opportunities created when people and nature interact. James Jiler writes a stirring account of his work at Rikers and its transforming impact on the lives of men and women caught in the New York City jail system.
--Professor Bill Burch, Hixon Chair, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

Author JAMES JILER has directed the Horticultural Society of New York's jail-to-street GreenHouse program at Rikers Island since the program's inception in 1997.