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“You’re smiling,” she said.
“I’ve been smiling all day,” McBee replied as she jabbed a shovel into the dirt to uproot a weed. “I’ve been happy all day because I have been able to get outside.”
The 27-year-old inmate at Kansas City’s Municipal Correctional Institution is participating in a gardening program that volunteers started this spring.
On Wednesday, inmates helped prepare beds for roses at the jail’s entrance on Ozark Road, and then hoed and weeded beds for tomatoes, peppers and herbs in one of the fenced yards.
The gardening program was started by Nancy Leazer, superintendent of corrections, and Joanne Katz, a criminal justice and legal studies professor at Missouri Western State University.
“Last summer we started visiting and talking about ways to get more involved,” Katz said.
The garden seemed a great idea for a place often called the municipal farm, a historical moniker for a place where prisoners once actively farmed for rehabilitation.
Katz, of Merriam, got the volunteer help from the Master Gardeners of Greater Kansas City through her neighbor Wanda Ryan, a member of the organization. The program got a big donation for plants and seeds from the Unitarian Church in Kansas City.
The gardening program is open to all of the jail’s 50 female inmates. Leazer hopes that someday it can expand to be offered to the 150 male inmates at the jail.
“Gardening is a way to engage in healthy exercise and it’s so therapeutic in many ways,” Leazer said.
Ryan agrees.
“I know what gardening does for me,” said Ryan, who was volunteering Wednesday along with another master gardener, Kathy Hoggard of Kansas City.
Hoggard said working alongside the inmates is a volunteer experience “with substance and social meaning.”
Katz thinks the garden project is an ideal way to help improve the criminal justice system.
“We have to be helping out somehow,” she said. “We have to be more available in recognizing these women are women just like us.”
It’s very empowering for the inmates, she said.
“Anytime a flower comes back every year, I take it personally,” Katz said. “I think, ‘You came back for me.’ ”
Don’t forget…
From noon until late this evening in the Power & Light District, American Red Cross volunteers will be collecting donations for victims of the area’s May 2 storms. A free concert at 7 p.m. will feature Three Dog Night and Dr. Hook.
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