Bringing green – and red, and yellow, and pink – to women’s prison

(TOWSON, MD) — Maryland Correctional Institution for Women (MCI-W) Warden Margaret Chippendale is a champion of inmate programming, because she knows busy inmates who learn skills are less likely to make things unsafe for staff, and more likely to find success when they return to society.

Her latest program at MCI-W—which has nearly  100 programs — is a Master Gardener class.

The first inmates to take the class are already hard at work, supervised by correctional officers as they plant multiple flower and vegetable gardens all around the compound. Eventually, the prison hopes to donate food to local food banks, as other DPSCS prisons already do.