Originally published July 20 2005
Flowers brighten up grim prison settings
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A Maryland prison warden tries to bring a positive atmosphere to prisons with flower gardens, meditation gardens and horticultural programs for inmates.
For 25 years, Mr. Galley has been brightening Maryland prisons and jails by having flowers planted on their grounds.
His latest project, at Western Correctional Institution (WCI), also is his most ambitious: a meditation garden where inmates can sit beside a gurgling fountain amid marigolds, yellow lilies, white roses and scarlet snapdragons.
"I believe absolutely that the environment need not be as stark and austere as they typically are in these institutions," Mr. Galley said at a June 16 dedication ceremony.
"I believe in color, and I believe in anything that can help soften this environment for both the staff and the inmates."
Mr. Galley, 61, also has left his mark at two prisons near Hagerstown -- Roxbury Correctional Institution and the Maryland Correctional Training Center -- and at the Montgomery County Detention Center, where he was warden from 1993 to 1998.
The flowers, orchards and ornamental trees planted at his direction are tended by inmates under a prison horticulture program with counterparts in other states, including Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Vermont.
In San Francisco, a horticulture program that began in the local jail in 1982 has grown into the Garden Project, a program for newly released inmates that the San Francisco Sheriff's Department says has reduced the re-arrest rate of participants.
The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services makes no claims that flower gardening reduces recidivism, but Secretary Mary Ann Saar said Mr. Galley's newest garden is bound to produce benefits.
"It offers a quiet, reflective area for staff and inmates at WCI.
"Lots of people in this institution have nowhere to go to have some peace and quiet, somewhere they can study or somewhere they can go if a member of their family dies.
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