Environmental Conviction

It’s 4 a.m.. Ol’ Bessy has us up before sunrise. She’s got to have her breakfast.

No, Bessy isn’t a baby. She’s a large food-waste processor—one that lives in the back room of our prison’s institutional kitchen.

We affectionately named her “Bessy” because she eats a lot and reminds us of a cow. This morning, a dozen white 55-gallon barrels, partially filled with food scraps from yesterday’s meals, fence her in. This is her hearty breakfast—200 gallons of discarded food weighing just over 1,100 pounds. She will chop up the food into tiny particles and remove excess water and contaminants, reducing the weight by about 65% and the volume by about half. The material comes out of Bessy’s chute looking like coleslaw. Bessy is just the first step in a composting program we originally started at the Washington State Reformatory.

We’ve been composting and worm farming for the past 13 years in collaboration with Evergreen State College’s Sustainability in Prisons Project. At the Reformatory, a crew of 10 of us were able to divert 100% of the prison’s food waste using several unique methods. Our fertilizers have been used on the prison’s vegetable gardens as well as donated to community groups and local municipalities. We were so successful that we were asked to help create an accredited curriculum and vocational certification for other people inside. Still not satisfied, we asked to be transferred to the Washington Corrections Center, about a hundred miles away, to do it all again. But it wasn’t easy getting here.

We are part of a group of incarcerated environmentalists who first got informed, then got inspired, to do something about a little known but significant contributor to climate change: food waste. We spent countless hours writing proposals and bent the ear of every prison official we could reach because doing a project like this inside—despite the hard work and pitiful pay—is considered a privilege. It might seem counterintuitive to some that this program, which saves the prison money and makes it compliant with new laws, would encounter resistance. But not if you consider the dehumanizing lens through which the prison staff see us.

We start each day before dawn, when the prison is just waking up. Our little room is a welcome oasis from the regular chaos and noise. As we switch on the overhead fan and fire up Bessy, a steady hum fills the room, drowning out the hustle and bustle of other workers washing pans and prepping meals.

After a quick stretch, we load Bessy up, and after she gnaws the waste down to a fraction of its original weight, we treat it with specialized microbes and pack it into sealable blue barrels for transport. By 7:30, we wash Bessy and her room until they’re sparkling. We clean, stack, and prepare the waste bins for today’s scraps, and we lug the blue barrels across the prison to the Sustainable Practices Lab.

There, Bessy’s leftovers will ferment for about a month, all the while releasing lactic acid. This process is called Bokashi, and it’s similar to kimchi or sauerkraut fermentation. After pickling, it moves to our cultures of composting red wiggler worms and black soldier fly grubs for further breakdown. Whatever doesn’t fit into these systems will be composted using traditional methods.

Sometimes, for a brief moment, it feels like we are at a regular job somewhere outside of this place—somewhere far from prison—except we earn a meager hourly wage of 42 cents. We have a running joke about it. Every day, one of us will turn to the other, a half-smile across our face, and quip: “There must be a better way to earn a dollar twenty-six!” We laugh because we clearly aren’t doing it for the money. We’re doing it because we care about the planet. Still, the prison staff have trouble seeing us that way.

They aren’t accustomed or trained to see their wards in a positive light. They’re convinced that we must be trying to bolster our résumés, improve our chances for clemency, garner accolades, or fulfill some other self-serving purpose. At our previous institution, for example, in the final stages of project development, a new supervisor came on board and immediately claimed that we were fabricating our daily weights. Despite piles of verifying documents, we were forced to spend the next several weeks validating our numbers under close scrutiny. It was only after proving our veracity, and without apology, that we were allowed to proceed. 

Surely, there are prison officials who care about the environment, but most are far too overwhelmed putting out the daily fires to have time for systemic changes, like adopting new methods for dealing with food waste. Decades of harsh sentencing practices have filled prisons to the brim. Meanwhile, prison administrators are finding it harder and harder to staff their facilities. At our prison, shortages of 20 to 30 staff members are common. This deteriorates conditions on the inside, exacerbating problems like violence and drug use. Of all the things on their plate, you can understand why food scraps aren’t a priority. 

Opposition came from our side as well. One particularly vocal lifer pushed the narrative that we were working for the man and, because we were saving the state money, our efforts were facilitating further incarceration. We’ve been able to flip that narrative.

In time, we’ve watched prisoners and staff change their tune, we’ve had amazing support from the scientific and academic communities, we’ve been featured and published in numerous venues, and we’ve hosted visitors from around the world. During a recent tour from Washington’s Department of Ecology, a visitor told one of our guys that the systems we’ve developed are “miles ahead” of anyone in the state. Afterwards, our colleague said that was one of the coolest things anyone has ever told him.