A FORMERLY INCARCERATED WOMAN has joined forces with incarcerated men at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center to help them create a garden that honors and remembers victims and survivors of crime.
Sol Mercado is with Planting Justice, an organization that empowers incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and cultivates community healing and food sovereignty, the term for the ability to grow one’s own food and medicine. Mercado has teamed up with an incarcerated group called The People In Blue to create “The Blue So(u)l Healing Garden.”
“We met Sol during a resource fair here in San Quentin,” said Henok Rufael, who is a member of TPIB.
“When she told us she created a healing garden at the women’s prison, I immediately said, we should have a space here at San Quentin dedicated to the people we have harmed,” said Rufael.
Mercado, who is featured in a short documentary film called, “Sol In The Garden,” shares her story about spending 16 years in the Central California Women’s Facility for murder. She said she found healing and a renewed sense of purpose through the transformative power of nature and community.
“I felt a sense of freedom in the garden, I felt inner peace, and was able to reflect and process,” she said.
Mercado had a troubled life as a young girl. She was raped in her own home and ended up joining a gang at age 13. As a teen, she shot and killed a man while he was sitting in his car.
“That little girl was broken and lost and had no healing, she didn’t ask for help,” said Mercado.
A growing process
She was sentenced to life in prison. But after a new youth offender law was passed, Mercado got a second chance at life. She was released in 2020.
“When I was in prison my only place of freedom was in the garden, at the Insight Garden program, and the garden we built in front of our housing unit,” she said. “I went there to get my mind out of prison and process a lot of things that led me to choosing that lifestyle that led me to prison.”
Mercado now makes a living amends by working to end gun violence and mass incarceration. She uses gardening as a tool to offer positive alternatives and support to people in vulnerable communities.
“I go back into CCWF and teach the women how to grow their own medicine and food,” she said. “I also encourage them to ask for help when they need it.”
Mercado also mentors youth in the community.
“If gardening helps me find my own self, my freedom, I believe it may also help the new generation of youth in these communities and offer them something positive in life to keep them away from crime,” she said.
TPIB are now taking lessons from Mercado on how to dig up the soil, rocks, and weeds in a small secluded area next to an education building inside San Quentin. That is where prison administrators have given the group permission to break ground.
Planting Justice donated gardening tools, soil and a variety of herbs, flowers, and plants, with healing properties that reduce anxiety and stress, and help boost the immune system and improve sleep. They planted lavender and chamomile.
There are also supplemental food ingredients, oregano, rosemary, and even a peach tree. The garden has a bench for visitors who need to sit while paying their respects. There is a blue wooden board with pegs for offenders to place color-coordinated ribbons, responding to specific crimes, and offenders have the option of writing victim names on these ribbons.
“We are also preparing a book for the garden, so people can learn more about gardening, the plants and their healing benefits while paying their respects, “ said Rufael. “We want the garden to be a place where we all can regain focus upon what we’re here for and what we need to be doing with our time. Prisons are full of harmful activities, we hope this can help people heal.”
A taste of freedom
A 2021 study by the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-partisan research and advocacy organization, found that incarceration can be inherently harmful to people’s mental health due to being separated from family and leading a meaningless life. Anxiety and depression are most common.
The late South Africa president Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison as an anti-apartheid protester, talks about the benefits of gardening in his autobiography “Long Walk To Freedom.”
“A garden was one of the few things in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend to it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction,” said Mandela. “The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom.”
The Blue So(u)l Healing Garden will now offer San Quentin prisoners a taste of freedom and a place for them to gain an understanding of empathy, amends, healing, and transformation.
“Rehabilitation, healing, and change is possible,” said Mercado. “I am living proof of that. I have not taken my second chance at freedom for granted. I want other incarcerated people to get a chance to taste that same freedom and I want them to get a chance to come home.”
Steve Brooks is a California Local News Fellow with Bay City News Foundation, reporting from inside San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. His perspective gives readers insight into issues and news from inside the prison. See more of his work at Inside/Out on Local News Matters.