GARDENING AT STERLING CORRECTIONAL FACILITY: A WORK OF HEART
by Keith C. Brooks Jr., Colorado Department Of Corrections #108827 Word Count: 1250
Correctional facilities are places of legalism – strict obedience to rules and laws. Usually,
prison yards are bleak, desolate, and barren making good on the promise that the State’s punishment
will be insufferable. Sterling Correctional Facility is CDOC’s largest prison housing nearly 2,500
inmates in rural Logan County, Colorado and can serve as a classic example of a penal institution
whose primary purpose is punishment, restriction, and confinement. There aren’t mountains
dominating the landscape like at Buena Vista Correctional Facility in Chaffee County Colorado or no
lush vegetation in the surrounding area like at Fremont Correctional Facility in Fremont County
Colorado. Huge walls of concrete are all one is guaranteed to see in the life of a sentence served
at SCF.
Imagine my surprise when I arrived at this facility renowned for concrete and dirt and found an
lone man, Timothy Nicholls, CDOC #136567 tending the dirt and sand, prepping it for the gardening season. Nicholls, it turns out, is a man of unabashed faith. He arrived at SCF in 2007 when SCF was considered to be an extremely violent yard. The culture shock of being locked up didn’t dissuade his vision for service. While SCF underwent drastic changes in management philosophies, trending with “normalization” practices, Nicholls though it prudent to start a garden using empty plots of dirt and sand. Approaching then Warden Matthew Hansen in 2015, Nicholls was able to get the green light to be a green-thumb. The primary motivation of Nicholls however wasn’t to bring color and life to the bland yard, but to begin a relationship with the outside community by giving back in
some way.
The Cooperating Ministries of Logan County provided the perfect avenue for Nicholls’ idea. Every spare plot on the Southeast and Southwest yards housing medium custody state prisoners is devoted to gardening. Nicholls’ Volunteer Prison Community Gardening Project or VPCGP has expanded beyond him and his dedication to giving back. Men serving sentences of incarceration have taken up more than a casual interest in their plots as the yard is bustling with groups cultivating the seasons young crop. Nicholls’ seminal act has spread organically and inspired others to partake· in this productive activity of mere servantship giving the prison administration’s goal of normalization a place to roost.
One of the more famous parables in the Gospels is the teaching that we reap what we sow. Seasons, seeds, cultivation, and celebration, just to highlight a few, are properties of gardening. Few activities embody the notion that a certain lifestyle (replete with decisions, behaviors, and habits characteristics of said lifestyle) enables one to produce tangible results, achieve certain goals, and behold fruits of labor quite like that of gardening. What Nicholls was able to do by getting Warden Hansen to let him start this project was remarkable because it marked a step outside of the status quo – legalism. Tools, seeds, and gardening materials are not distinctive features of typical conditions of confinement. This is an interation of what the Gospels sought to convey to the world – fruits of the Spirit or Works of the Heart truly mark the Christian lifestyle and to a degree, restorative justice as a guiding principle.
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