When Adolf Jerger was sent to Cook County Jail in February for failing to pay child support, he never imagined his six months behind bars would include growing produce for upscale Chicago restaurants.
Mr. Jerger, who worked as an auto mechanic for more than 27 years, is four months into earning his master gardener certificate at the jail, along with 21 other inmates this year. For nearly two decades, the jail has offered non-violent offenders training in horticulture, gardening and landscaping and has graduated more than 200 inmates.
The program has generated 9,000 pounds of produce each year at a cost of about $1,500 annually, paid for from profits from the inmate commissary. Over the past 17 years, it has provided an estimated 50 tons of fresh produce to homeless shelters and other non-profit organizations.
Despite the program’s success, the challenge for jail officials has been making the program self-sustaining. They may have found the answer in a just-completed 1,500-square-foot rooftop greenhouse, an addition to the existing 14,000-square-foot garden.
Now, produce buyers from Charlie Trotter’s Restaurant, The Publican and Ala Carte have come calling for micro-greens such as arugula, mustard greens and basil.
“We don’t see it as it’s the Cook County Jail,” said Matthias Merges, executive chef at Trotter’s. “They’re a purveyor of something of quality and we like to use it because what we do with our cuisine is quality-driven produce and product.”
The $149,000 expansion, financed by money generated from commissary purchases, allows gardening year-round.
“I think it’s great,” Mr. Jerger said. “Because me being in a field working with my hands — it gives me a chance to do that out here in a different form than I’m usually accustomed to.”
The program started in 1993 in partnership with the University of Illinois Extension Service.
David Devane, executive director of the Department of Community Supervision and Intervention at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office said one goal is to provide inmates with job skills they can take with them once they are released. He added that the program is also therapeutic: Of the 36 inmates who went through the program last year, only one was arrested and convicted after release, jail officials said.
“It’s no cure-all,” Devane said. “But quite a few of them express a great deal of satisfaction, especially as we go on in the growing season and they can see their plants getting considerably higher.”
Mr. Merges said he plans to go to the jail every other week to see what is available and to advise jail officials on what produce will be in demand from season to season.
“Frankly, it’s much nicer than 50 percent of every other farm out there,” he said. “And I think the program’s great, it helps people out. It keeps them focused and the product they turn out is excellent.”
I saw this on WTTW earlier. I don’t have a problem with these inmates growing crops or becoming master gardeners. I do have a problem with what may be sales of their produce to local restaurants with inmates’ less-than-free-market-wages (if any) built into the possibly lower price. There are thousands of non-offenders, some with excellent college educations, who are seriously unemployed and/or underemployed. We can easily find stories of such people who had good careers and now haven’t been allowed to earn a cent in a year or more. They are not too good to grow food. Crime does pay if non-offenders are hung out to dry without jobs because they are believed less likely to become crime threats to society.
In 05 at Stuttgart Town-Hall Jeremy Rifkin (Washington DC) explained not to compare unemployment rate between Europe and USA due to high prisoner rate in the states. Make use of prison labor is known since centuries and had been used excessively by dictatorial governments. There is no relation between criminal justice and Joe Arpaio’s chain gangs or other form of excuses for correction and rehabilitation.