Planting Prison Abolition
Artist and gardener jackie sumell works with plants to imagine a landscape without prisons.
Photography by Karl Blossfeldt, 1928, via The Rijksmuseum.
Available in Broccoli Issue 20 (Print)
jackie sumell’s commitment to abolition—the movement to replace our country’s harmful prison industrial complex with community-based, trauma-informed solutions—began over 20 years ago when she first met Robert King. Alongside the late Herman Wal- lace and Albert Woodfox, these men are known as “The Angola Three” of Louisiana State Penitentiary (called Angola after the former plantation it is built on), where they were forced to spend decades in solitary confinement while wrongfully incarcerated.
Inspired and informed by these mentors, jackie has since built a collective of plant-oriented projects that fit under the entity Growing Abolition. From a flower pot garden built in collaboration with over two dozen incarcerated mothers in Santa Cruz, California, to an interactive greenhouse installed at MoMA PS1 that is the size of a solitary confinement cell at Colorado’s ADX Florence, the U.S.’s highest-security prison, jackie is using the earth as a channel for abolitionist teaching.
Broccoli sat down with jackie to discuss her mission to grow plants, not prisons.
Talk to me about how this work started.
I met Herman and Woodfox through King, when I saw him speak at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco maybe a month after he came home. I sat for the first time in my life in front of someone who had just spent 29 years in solitary confinement—longer than
I had been alive. Twenty-nine years in a 6-by-9-foot cell, minimum 23 hours a day, for something he couldn't have possibly done.
So I asked King what I could do. He said, “Write to my comrades Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. Let the prison know that you know they’re alive.” I wrote them, and, in that pro- cess, my whole world was shaken and rearranged. These men were so gener- ous, kind, grounded, wise, and loving. And yet they were being tortured. That was the beginning of undoing my belief that bad people were incarcerated. Through their tutelage, love, and patience, I really started to shift and ultimately focus my activism toward an abolitionist landscape.
How did you start working with plants?
When writing to Herman, I asked him what kind of house he dreamed of. He said: “I can clearly see the gardens; they will be full of gloxinias, delphin- iums, and roses. I wish for guests to be able to smile and walk through gardens all year round.”
So I knew there was a way to uphold his life and legacy with gardens, but I wasn’t a grower. I lived with someone who had spent time on a homestead, and when she moved out, I had to experiment with the garden she left behind. In the first couple weeks of playing in the dirt, so many of the conditions for abolition came forward. The garden is the perfect metaphor for the values of abolition—commitment, joy, healing, wellness, and growth. And the pace—a garden bed might be dormant for three or four years before it grows. I worked with Herman for 12 years before his conviction was overturned. Both processes require time, energy, care, and the most precise conditions to occur simultaneously.
You’ve said that the scale of your work “runs from seeds to greenhouses.” Walk us through the many arms of Growing Abolition.
It’s an ecosystem, and that’s intentional. Our Liberation Seed Packets invite folks to plant them in concert with contemplative questions around abolition. If you’re growing nettle, you’re being asked how you hold space for something that can sting you and hurt you but is also packed with medicine. The complexity of nettle inspires us to think about human beings who maybe have caused harm, but are still incredible healers, mothers, brothers, fathers, etc. The life cycle of the plant is intended to be the guide for tackling these questions.
Our Abolitionist’s Field Guide builds on this as a more dense training manual, asking how we move through the world as abolitionists, with playful, engaging exercises. That grows into our Solitary Gardens, which are public green spaces designed by individuals currently in solitary confinement. They were inspired by a project Herman and I collaborated on, The House That Herman Built. It eventually exhibited at Prospect.1, an art triennial in Louisiana. Now, we have two dozen gardens across the U.S. Some of our Solitary Gardeners’ families come and harvest and feed themselves. These gardens also fuel our apothecary, a cart that redistributes plant medicine to heal communities that systems-impacted folks are accused of having harmed.
The larger vision is to create an abolition-prin- cipled diversion program where currently incar- cerated Solitary Gardeners can both leverage their garden work with a parole board and come home to living-wage work at Solitary Gardens. Ultimately, we want to provide what I call plant-powered aboli- tionist programming for anyone and everyone.
Each piece of Growing Abolition plays into the other. As one evolves, they collectively grow into something else.
Exactly. And it provides access points for anyone. You could show up every week at the Solitary Gardens and volunteer your time. You could write people inside. You could plant your own seeds. That’s the beauty of abolition and its generosity as a practice to meet us where we are and welcome us back, again and again.