What We Do

Doing good while doing time – that’s our mantra. At the Sustainable Prisons Project, we encourage everyone in our community, including incarcerated men and women, to become stewards of the planet. Toward that end, our activities focus on three areas:

GREEN-COLLAR EDUCATION AND TRAINING

We inspire and train inmates and correctional staff through programs designed to improve prison sustainability and connect participants to the larger world of science and conservation. Our instructors range from biologists and farmers to business entrepreneurs and green energy experts.

SUSTAINABLE OPERATION OF PRISONS

We help correctional staff develop cost-effective, environmentally sound practices for operating prisons and engage offenders with direct responsibility for these activities where security is in place. Activities include recycling, composting, organic gardening and rehabilitating troubled dogs.

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND CONSERVATION

With support from visiting scientists, we carry out ecological research and conservation projects involving inmates, college students and community partners. Current projects include rearing endangered Oregon spotted frogs and Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies and propagating native prairie plants.

We create a collaborative, intellectually stimulating environment in which incarcerated men and women play key roles in conservation and advancing scientific knowledge. We encourage teamwork, mutual respect and a stewardship ethic among individuals who typically have little or no access to nature or opportunities in science and sustainability. Our vision is not only to save tax dollars and natural resources, but also to help offenders rebuild their lives for the benefit of all.

Our current activities focus on prisons at Cedar Creek, Stafford Creek, Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women, and the Washington Corrections Center for Women. These facilities represent a broad spectrum of population size, gender, security level and infrastructure, which maximizes the extensibility of this project to other locations. Working with professional evaluators, we document the effects of our activities on the knowledge, behavior and attitudes of all participants and serve as a model for other prisons and residential institutions such as military bases, assisted living centers and summer camps.