“The island is now a big vegetable garden”: Imaginaries of Nature and Carceral Reform at Rikers Island

Abstract

The practice of conflating green with a social and moral good is a historically specific social process. The purpose of this article is to show how that process has made particularly good company for carceral humanism and legitimisation. By tracing initiatives integrating gardening at New York City's Rikers Island jail complex, I argue that projects and narratives cloaked in visions of green, nature, and sustainability obscure and reproduce both popular and institutional claims to expansionist carceral reform in the name of offering an inherently rehabilitative service. Drawing on conversations around commodity fetishism, urban political ecology, sustainability, and carceral reform, this article shows how holding nature as an inherent source of moral high ground that, by default, rehabilitates all who take advantage of it, is to disregard the social mechanisms that in turn naturalise the prison-industrial complex.