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This report is in partnership with the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Health Journalism as part of a series for the 2024 California Health Equity Fellowship.
In a pocket of the city of Oakland, Sobrante Park Nursery is an agricultural oasis. It is possible that visitors forget the city landscapes as they tour the nursery‘s varied selection of mints, apples, saplings and native Californian plants.
The nursery is run by Planting Justice, a local nonprofit dedicated to “providing sustainable living wage jobs, food access and holistic programming for communities impacted by mass incarceration.”
Among its services, Planting Justice provides jobs to formerly incarcerated community members through a holistic re-entry method. This includes educational programming on health, wellness and agricultural skills, internships for youth in the community, free produce and access to a community garden to combat food desert problems in the community.
“You heal the land, you heal the people,” says Lynn Vidal, director of operations. “And Planting Justice is sort of a microcosm of politically disenfranchised people and cultures coming together on the same plot of land.”
At the nursery, a team of 22 full-time staffers grow 1,200 varieties of plants that are shipped all over the continental United States, according to Planting Justice. In addition, the organization provides 40 paid internships and has more than 2,500 youth participants enter the space annually. Overall, Planting Justice has provided 85 jobs to the local community.
All of this is having a positive influence on the individuals who work with the organization. Planting Justice claims a mere 2% recidivism rate among its employees who were formerly incarcerated. In contrast, the state of California’s recidivism rate was 42% in February 2024.
Lack of resources, education and vocational opportunities were some of the major barriers to leaving gangs and re-incarceration among youth, according to surveys and interviews conducted by BenitoLink.
In part one of this series, we showed that rural areas such as San Benito County have to deal with their own specific types of problems regarding gang recruitment. Due to a lack of resources, the county and its nonprofits struggle to provide alternatives to gang participation.
A vocational program like Planting Justice could be an asset in an agricultural county like San Benito.
Vocational Education
According to a 2016 report by the Center for American Progress, 54% of 18- to 24-year-olds in state and federal prisons did not finish high school. Another 40% had graduated high school or obtained a GED but never attended college.
Organizations such as Planting Justice provide a model of vocational and educational opportunities and programs to help previously incarcerated youth gain the skills and knowledge to support themselves.
The Brookings Institute notes that employment opportunities for those who have been incarcerated can be severely limited because of low educational achievement and the presence of a felony conviction on job applications.
However, research from the Brookings Institute, the National Association of Workforce Boards and RAND agree that education and employment opportunities reduce recidivism.
RAND data shows that incarcerated people who received vocational and educational training were over 30% more likely to be employed. These same individuals were also 40% less prone to recidivism during their first year of reentry.
The National Association of Workforce Boards adds that the most useful among these trainings are the ones which provide apprenticeships with “useful, transferable skills across a number of existing and emerging industries.”
Planting Justice currently provides 40-plus paid internships a year to youth in the community and claims a 0% recidivism rate among their formerly incarcerated youth. They host internship cycles in the spring and summer.
Co-Director Salvador Mateo says the internships function as vocational training in urban agriculture and gardening, along with teaching youth culinary skills The organization pays for the interns’ food handler certificates as long as they commit two to three hours to understand food hygiene and safety.
Mateo himself started as an intern with the organization in 2010 as part of a youth education program at Fremont High School in Oakland, California.
“We try our best to educate our youth interns so that when they leave and transition elsewhere, they have some basic understanding of how plants grow, the potting mix, soil mixture, irrigation and pest and disease control on a basic level,” he says.
Urban agriculture and agricultural training are some of the ways many activists have tried to create alternative pathways to incarceration. Several other cities have hosted similar programs to address youth crime risk including The Urban Creators in Philadelphia, Windy City Harvest Crops in Chicago, and Soul Fire Farm in Petersburg, New York.
The internship also provides youth with opportunities to develop administrative skills, culinary skills, marketing, sales and customer service skills.
The organization also encourages youths to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas outside of the internship as well. Mateo recalls one youth who, using the sweet potatoes grown at the nursery, would bake sweet potato pies to sell to staff: “Every Friday, she would make individual pies, and she would bring in about 15 and sell them for $10 a pop. She would make $150 in less than two hours.”
“We are lifting people up,” Vidal of Planting Justice adds. “We are giving people the skills and the support so that if we weren’t here they would be able to do this themselves.”
Vidal says Planting Justice is in the process of opening a print shop where youths can learn how to screen print, and learn some support functions including ordering, inventory, advertising and marketing.
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