Favors is one of eight inmates at a Baltimore transition center involved in an initiative to make green space out of eight Harlem Park vacant lots with wildflowers and grasses cultivated behind bars — and at the same time learn gardening and horticulture skills they might use once released.
That's the aim of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and city and state officials. They partnered to launch the Maryland Green Prisons Initiative to come up with cost-efficient ways to revegetate vacant lots while studying urban ecosystems.
The Baltimore Office of Sustainability and UMBC have targeted the blighted West Baltimore neighborhood, planting signs about the initiative along abandoned swaths of land, then clearing strewn debris. The Baltimore City Correctional Center has supplied the human capital — inmates who are taking a weekly two-hour course in horticulture that includes one hour of study and one hour of hands-on gardening.
For Favors, of Silver Spring, watching the seed-to-plant process has been something to marvel. The end result, he said, made him as proud as a father watching his child go off to the first day of school.
