Greener on the outside for prisons (GOOP)

Abstract

People in prison tend to come from marginalised, economically, and socially disadvantaged sections of society, exhibiting disproportionately high incidences of ill-health. Growing food in prison can provide an intervention that supports both health improvement and positive resettlement opportunities via education, learning, and skills development. This chapter explores these opportunities through the therapeutic horticulture programme, Greener on the Outside for Prisons (GOOP), in England. It proposes the transition of existing GOOP therapeutic horticulture projects into commercial cooperative businesses in order to further reinforce the health and rehabilitative benefits of prison-grown food and to take GOOP to a new level of intervention through the prison gate. This would enable GOOP to deliver additional employment and resettlement benefits as well as its existing health and rehabilitation benefits. Integrating this transition into local food-based Community Wealth Building strategies in the communities to which GOOP participants will return on release would offer a truly whole system of prison-grown food for both individual and wider public health and wealth-building benefit.