Richard Schiffman

“That’s my baby,” said Mike Cruz, a stocky young man who is serving time at Rikers. He was gesturing toward a patch of flowers whose flamboyant shade of orange matched the stripes on his prison jumpsuit.

“It’s a Mexican sunflower,” he said. “I put the seeds in myself, and look at it now, it’s 5 feet tall. You get to watch them grow, you feel good about that. It’s like having a child.”

The 2 1/2-acre garden where Cruz and three other prisoners were working is one of seven at Rikers created by the Horticultural Society of New York in partnership with the New York City Department of Correction.

The GreenHouse, as it is called, is the nation’s oldest and largest prison garden. It has quietly flourished for the past three decades, a period during which rampant gang violence and a scandalous culture of abuse among the guards made Rikers the most notorious jail in America.

So when the city finally closes Rikers Island, as it plans to do by 2026, few New Yorkers will miss it. But also lost will be a garden sanctuary in the nation’s largest penal colony that has a remarkable track record for keeping inmates who have worked the soil there out of prison.

For more than 500 incarcerated men and women who enter them each year, the gardens are a tranquil refuge from the chaos of jail. Not everyone, however, is charmed at first. Some don’t want to wake up early — the garden workday begins at 6 a.m. Others found the idea of working with plants to be insufficiently macho.

Cruz’s objections were more visceral.

“I didn’t like dirt, I didn’t like bugs,” he said as he prepared some flowering echinacea for a circular bed. “But I gave the garden a chance, and it’s like crazy, I fell in love with it.”

He says that he especially enjoys pruning the roses. “It’s a thinking job, it’s like a puzzle,” he said. “You need to figure out what bad stuff to cut out to get the good stuff to grow.” Cruz now spends 20 hours a week there.

The inmates arrive at the garden by bus accompanied by two unarmed correction officers, trading their cells for a glass greenhouse, a goldfish pond, a wooden gazebo and scores of raised soil beds growing organic vegetables and herbs. There are peach trees, fig trees and papaya trees. There is a grape arbor, as well as a chest-tall patch of native plants thronged with butterflies and bees, visited by the occasional opossum.

It is almost certainly the only place on the island where the incarcerated call the shots. Aided by a team of experts from the Horticultural Society (the Hort, as it’s known to those involved), the inmates plan the gardens and landscaping, build the sheds and other small structures and choose seeds from a catalog during the winter.

The men don’t always come with prior knowledge of the flowers that they are ordering, according to Hilda Krus, the director of the GreenHouse, so they tend to choose ones with beguiling, feminine-sounding names. One participant loved a showy perennial he had tended there so much that he named his first daughter Chrysanthemum.

“I’ll miss this garden,” said Keith Johnson, whose 10 1/2-month stay on the island ends in a few weeks. “But not Rikers,” he added.

Johnson, who has been offered a paid internship with the Hort after he is released, was raking a path as a flock of Guinea fowl (a gift from a prison farm on Long Island) clucked and pecked for insects around his feet.

“People are especially fond of Limpy, a bird that was hurt when it flew into a barbed wire fence,” Krus said. “They say, ‘This bird is like me, I’m also injured, they might want to get rid of me, but they won’t succeed.’”

The same care goes to damaged or unattractive plants that would be thrown away in most other gardens. “The students tell me, ‘We don’t want to get rid of things that are imperfect.’ They do everything that they can to save them,” Krus said.

“Development in a garden is slow,” she added. “Some things change overnight, but most things develop slowly.”

When the GreenHouse started, its aims were modest. In the late ’80s, a single volunteer, Barbara Margolis — a Hort board member and official in the administration of Mayor Edward Koch — funded a small garden, where she socialized with inmates and offered them employment advice. The garden expanded, and it was eventually promoted as a job-training program, which was enthusiastically supported by the city, eager to demonstrate that it was equipping people for life after prison.

As word of the brutal conditions within Rikers spread, the focus shifted. “People started saying that we should not be treating these people like criminals, because 70% of them suffer from mental health issues,” recalled Sara Hobel, the Horticultural Society’s current director. “The city began to realize that not everybody is ready for work. Many of these guys had led lives of trauma. We need to deal with that first.”

This was when Krus was hired, and the focus of the garden shifted from vocational training to life skills: self-care, nutrition, teamwork, personal responsibility.

As innovative as it was when it was founded, the GreenHouse is no longer unique. There are others, like the Insight Garden Program, which combines gardening with mindfulness training. It operates in California’s San Quentin prison and 13 other facilities nationwide and serves approximately 1,500 incarcerated people annually, according to the group’s founder, Beth Waitkus.

Amy Lindemuth, a landscape architect from Seattle, helped design a garden for incarcerated women and their children at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County. She notes that gardens and farms in prisons were common in the early 20th century, but they fell out of favor after the deadly Attica prison riot in 1971, when security concerns became paramount.

“These gardens help repair the damage that people have been through, both in prison and in their earlier lives,” she said. “They are quiet places to be alone with your own thoughts away from the cacophony and stress of the prison environment.”

Not everyone is a fan, at least at first. Jails still prioritize security and discipline, which can be hard to maintain in a garden setting. While some guards at Rikers were initially skeptical of the program, most who work in the garden come to see its value.

Officer Ronald Wells, who has spent 14 years on the island, said the garden taught him a less adversarial way of relating to the men. Many guards on the island suffer from PTSD, he said, and the garden also helps them cope with the stress of their role.

“I’ll be working side by side with them using the shears, raking leaves, and they really open up to me,” Wells said. “I talk to them about their goals, their problems. It allows you to come out of just being a correctional officer and relate to people as human beings.”

Stacey King, executive director for educational services at the Department of Correction, said that lessons learned in the garden program are being applied to a recently instituted “reform agenda,” which includes initiating a number of so-called “re-entry programs” that train people in trades like automobile repair, carpentry and cooking.

King said that these rehabilitation programs minimize conflict. “It’s proven that reducing idleness reduces violence,” King said. “Participants in the GreenHouse project are less likely to act out, because they enjoy the garden and don’t want to endanger their participation in it.”

But the question remains: How much effect can a few gardens have on the culture of violence at a place like Rikers?

“The program brings much needed humanity to the people who take part,” said Dr. Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer of New York jails and the author of “Life and Death in Rikers Island,” a book on the health risks of incarceration.

“But,” he added, “it’s a minor influence when put against the overall inhumanity of Rikers Island.”

“We have incredibly high rates of institutionalized brutality,” he continued. “Sure, a program like this gives us important lessons, it has a positive effect. But the real question is: Why do we parcel out human treatment to such a small group of people? Why haven’t we translated those lessons to the way the rest of the jail system works?”

Crucial to evaluating the success of rehabilitation programs like GreenHouse is recidivism, the rate at which formerly incarcerated people return to prison.

According to Prof. Deborah Koetzle of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 68% of those released from U.S. prisons are rearrested within three years. On Rikers, the recidivism problem is even worse: Close to half return to jail within a year.

For Koetzle, these dismal statistics prove that “the prison system is broken.” “We lock people up, we don’t provide the services they need, and we make it difficult for them to get jobs when they come home,” she said. “Prisons cause a lot of harm.”

While a garden can blunt that harm, it won’t eliminate it, she said. But it does appear to help.

A 2008 study by Alison Laichter, a graduate student at Columbia University, showed that participants in the GreenHouse program had a 40% lower rate of reconviction than inmates in the general prison population. Similar results are reported for the garden at San Quentin.

But according to Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge, it is difficult to say whether green prison programs are the cause of this difference.

“Serious or violent offenders are unlikely to qualify for such programs,” he said. “So perhaps those who are selected into them were less likely to reoffend to begin with.”

While the precise effect may be hard to quantify, Taariq King credits the garden with his transformation from a frightened young inmate without job skills to someone who has found a sense of direction in his life.

King was sent to Rikers at the age of 18, accused of second-degree murder and possession of a weapon. Early in his jail stint he tried working in the garden, which was way outside of his comfort zone, he said. But the garden grew on him quickly.

After two years of waiting for his trial, he was eventually acquitted. He entered the Hort as an intern, and now is a full-time employee.

On a recent Thursday, he was out with a team planting flowers at Parkside and Ocean Avenue across the street from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Largely because he found the garden, he now considers his time in jail as “a curse that turned into a blessing.”

His fondest memory of the garden, he said, was when Krus brought a bucket full of water that had rose petals soaking in it for King to wash his feet in after he had waded into a pond full of algae scum. “It was amazing,” he recalled. “My feet felt tingly for hours.”

This article originally appeared in

The Secret Jailhouse Garden of Rikers Island

NEW YORK — Set incongruously in the middle of Rikers Island’s post-apocalyptic landscape of low-slung jail blocks and razor wire is a lush garden, teeming with birds and butterflies, that seems to have been teleported down from some happier planet.

<h1>There were camels in pasture, a gigantic wingless emu, shrieking peacocks on the dirt paths, a pen stocked with miniature horses and donkeys. </h1>

There were owls, falcons and an Andean condor with a 10-foot wingspan, as well as every conceivable breed of farm animal housed in the barns, cages and outdoor enclosures that dotted the campus of what might be his new school.

For his mother, Leslie DeLeon, that first visit to Green Chimneys, a school for special-needs children on a former dairy farm in Putnam County, New York, seemed the answer to her prayers.

“He was like, ‘Oh, I can watch the chickens lay their eggs and sit on them,'” she recalled. “I was crying, because I knew that I had finally found the right place for my son.”

Before coming to Green Chimneys, Xander, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, felt overwhelmed at school. He would throw tantrums and often simply walk out of class at the Manhattan charter school he attended. By 10 a.m. most mornings, the school would call DeLeon, a public-school teacher in Washington Heights, to ask her to pick up her son.

Now at Green Chimneys, Xander is getting A’s and B’s. “The school staff tell him that he won’t be able to work on the farm if he doesn’t continue to do well in school,” DeLeon said. The prospect of being separated from his beloved goats has motivated Xander in ways his traditional school never could.

The Green Chimneys School for Little Folk was opened in 1948 by an animal-loving educator and philanthropist named Samuel B. Ross Jr. He pioneered the idea that emotionally challenged children could gain confidence and become socially adept by caring for animals.

What started as a boarding school with 11 students is now a fully accredited day and residential facility with two campuses (the larger in Brewster, New York, and the smaller in Carmel, New York), with 243 students, and at least as many animals.

While the idea that animals could help kids learn and heal emotionally was revolutionary in Ross’ day, the benefits today are practically common knowledge. “There has been a lot of research on pets at home and how healthy it is in the past 10 years,” said Steven Klee, director of clinical and medical services at Green Chimneys.

Yet psychologists have been slow to translate these insights into effective strategies for helping people in a therapeutic setting. At first, Klee himself was skeptical that animals could be a part of therapy.

“When you have traditional training as a psychologist, you never think about doing anything outside of the office,” Klee said. “Therapy means talking — you wouldn’t even consider using an animal.”

At Green Chimneys, however, he learned that sometimes it’s easier for kids with behavioral issues to develop relationships with animals than with people.

“Humans are much harder to understand,” Klee said. “Animals in a sense are purer, more consistent, more accepting. You are kind to the animals, they show their appreciation.”

For a fearful child, Klee has found that interacting with an animal can be a first step to relating successfully with others.

Perhaps surprisingly, this kind of interaction works even with the least outdoorsy city kids. Most come from New York suburbs, and around 10 percent are from the city itself.

“I used to stay in my room not doing anything — I’d miss school and stuff,” said Austin Stark, a Green Chimneys senior from midtown Manhattan. “I wasn’t exactly a nature fan in the beginning.” He initially resisted the school, and was able to fall asleep only with music blaring in his headphones.

“It seemed like nothing was happening here,” he recalled. “I wanted to get back to the city.” That changed when Austin developed a bond with the somewhat bowlegged horse Nelson.

“I felt for his pain; I gave Nelson moral support,” he said. “If I was feeling bad, I would come to the horse barn to clear my head.” Before long he had signed up to mentor younger children in the dorm.

Sean Duffy, a history teacher at the school, witnessed the transformation firsthand. “I’ve seen Austin grow from a quiet, withdrawn kid in ninth grade,” Duffy said, “to someone who is successful academically and socially. He has even become something of a leader in the class.”

Animal-assisted therapy is no longer unique to Green Chimneys. Several schools in New York state, like the Orchard School, run by the nonprofit Andrus in Yonkers, and The Charlton School for girls in Burnt Hills, near Schenectady, offer some kind of therapeutic program incorporating animals. But according to Kevin Morris, director for the Research Institute for Human-Animal Connection at the University of Denver, Green Chimneys remains in the vanguard.

“There are schools with a horse program or a dog program; there are other places with farm animals,” he said. “But this is the only place that I know of that incorporates all of those programs at one site.”

Morris and his team have been conducting research at Green Chimneys as part of an ongoing study into animal therapy. The researchers have installed cameras in the classrooms that record classes on a daily basis. They analyze the children’s behavior before and after they have been on the farm.

While the results of their study won’t be published until their research is completed, it is already clear, Morris said, “that there is a calming and focusing effect inherent in these farm programs.”

It remains to be seen, however, whether the changes that they are observing are temporary, he said, or if they can lead to a permanent shift in a child’s well-being.

Public schools seem to be at their capacity in their ability to help children with special needs. One reason for this, according to Rachel Fish, an assistant professor of special education at New York University, is the nationwide shortage of teachers who are trained to work with them. Demand for programs like Green Chimneys has never been greater, she said, especially in New York City, when limits on reimbursing privately run schools for such services was lifted by the de Blasio administration in 2014.

With a staff-to-student ratio of 4-1 on the main campus and a level of individualized care that few schools can offer, Green Chimneys has become a beacon for children who are unable to function in a traditional school environment.

Every year there are about 1,000 referrals to Green Chimneys; last year, only 95 new students were admitted. It is also expensive. Tuition is $50,000 a year for day students, and considerably more for those who board. The school is partly funded by the New York State Education Department, which has licensed it to serve students from kindergarten through high school.

Green Chimneys is always free for the students themselves, said the school’s executive director, Dr. Edward Placke. Their tuition is paid by their local school districts, which are sometimes reluctant to send students there. Parents who are eager to get their children into the program occasionally hire professional “parent advocates” to argue their case before the districts, or even lawyers to file suit.

Once they are admitted, most students are eligible for the “Learn and Earn” program, where they are assigned chores on the farm, working with the animals or tending garden plots in exchange for a small stipend.

Xander’s job is to feed the goats and clean their pens. On a recent Thursday, the soft-spoken boy visited his charges together with his social worker, Elaine McGlinchey.

“This is Snowflake, my favorite” he said pointing to a cream-colored Saanen goat that had come to the gate to greet him. “Sometimes when I feed Snowflake, the sheep come by and try to eat her food,” he said. But he pointed out that Snowflake has two friends called Tom and Jerry who use their horns to drive off hungry intruders.

“The goats help one another,” Xander said. “They also really help me when I’m angry, because they are so peaceful and calm. If I feel sad, Snowflake comes and sits next to me.”

Like many children at Green Chimneys, Jack Elliot, a 12-year-old from Rye, New York, has received a diagnosis on the autism spectrum. When Jack, a loquacious boy with long brown hair, first went there, he often failed to pick up on people’s body language, standing too close to people or touching them in ways that made them uncomfortable.

Then Jack met Dixie, a shaggy-maned Shetland pony. He had been at the school for weeks, and it was the first time that the staff saw the boy smile, said Valerie Parody, Jack’s riding instructor.

Horses have to be approached slowly and calmly, Parody said, and you need to become sensitive to subtle cues like swooshes of the tail and the position of their ears to know whether or not you can safely get near them.

“Let’s say you are really going crazy, they might bite or kick you,” Jack explained as he led a brown miniature horse across a field.

Being with horses has required Jack to work on his own emotional self-regulation, Parody said. By learning the body language of horses, she says, he has also gradually learned to pick up on similar body cues in people.

“He’s become more aware of people’s personal boundaries and the need to respect them. I’ve seen him grow in confidence, the feeling ‘I can do this,'” Parody said. Jack now works with bigger horses as well, grooming and riding them and mucking out their stalls.

He has also become something of an expert. He spoke with relish about different types of dominance in horses, the reason they sleep standing up (to quickly escape predators) and what their favorite foods are. “Maya is pregnant now,” he said, pointing to a gray mare lounging in the pen. “When I touch her belly, I can feel the baby kicking.”

Not every child flourishes at the school. Those with severe learning disabilities and behavioral problems may struggle, and the average stay (2 1/2 years) is not always long enough to affect permanent changes in children. Transitions from Green Chimneys back to families and local schools can also be difficult.

Moreover, not everyone agrees that special-needs children should be sent to privately run schools at public expense. Some argue that the money would be better spent strengthening the special-needs programs in public schools rather than offering the best education that money can buy to a fortunate few.

Still, for the children who are lucky enough to be admitted to Green Chimneys, the prognosis is good.

Luis Tejada grew up in Washington Heights in the 1990s. By his own admission, he hung out with the wrong circle and became so unruly that his single mother could no longer handle him.

Luis was angry and often violent, and mistrustful of adults. But he was also a secret lover of animals. He collected stray dogs and persuaded a local building superintendent to let him house them in the basement where he would go to feed them.

When his mother shipped him off to Green Chimneys, as he put it, he was resentful. But Luis immediately fell in love with the horses, relishing the challenge and danger of working with big animals.

He developed a special connection with one ex-racehorse called Bonz. “They rescued him just like they rescued me,” recalled Tejada, now 31 and an information technician at a nursing home in Pennsylvania.

Miyako Kinoshita, an administrator at the school who was his riding instructor at the time, recalled a turning point in his development. “Luis really wanted to take Bonz to the local horse show,” she said.

At first the staff was skeptical. “It’s really hard for our kids to compete in such a situation with children whose families have money to give them private lessons and own their own horses,” Kinoshita said. “It is a very difficult thing to compete against other kids who don’t have the same problems he did.”

They needn’t have worried. Luis took second place in the riding competition; Bonz took first place for horses. Tejada still displays the ribbons he won that year in his bedroom.

Eight-year-old Xander DeLeon could not have been more surprised if he had walked up the gangplank into Noah’s ark.

Lessons learned, by way of a barn

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Richard Schiffman

Articles written by the author

The Secret Jailhouse Garden of Rikers Island

Lessons learned, by way of a barn