Of prisons, gardens, and the way out

Abstract Metaphorically, the garden invokes a repertoire of skills, arts, and virtues that run counter to the act of confinement but are embedded in its disciplinary practice: spaces in punitive environments where care, growth, health, and cultivation are emphasized. Gardens and the force of law and labor are foregrounded in Judeo-Christian myths, in slavery, and in prison farms as spaces of expulsion and brutality. Yet as abandoned, fortress-style prisons dilapidate, and vines and weeds break through concrete, we can begin to ask, What might it mean to imagine the prison through the lens of the garden?

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