How an educational farming program operates at Los Angeles County’s largest and oldest operating jail complex
It was 2 p.m., time to feed the chicken and collect the eggs. Patrick Mitchell drove half a dozen of his students to the coop, a 10-minute drive away from the classroom where they just finished a day’s coursework.
The students, clad in fluorescent yellow suits and rubber boots, strode over the barbed wire and onto a field sodden by running tap water. Careful not to step over feces, three men chased after two black stock, struggling to catch them back to the cage. The others circled the brick-red coop, knees bent, spreading their arms to stop the birds from flying away. After all nine chickens were forced back to roost, one man refilled their feeds and water into the basins set up at every corner.
Welcome to the farm inside Pitchess Detention Center (PDC), Los Angeles County’s largest and oldest operating jail complex that houses over 8,000 inmates.
This is the sixth year that Mitchell has been working as an instructor in the farming program at the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department Jail. Founded as a collaboration between Jail Staff Operations, 5-Keys Charter School, Inmates Services Bureau (ISB), Education Based Incarceration (EBI) and Jail Enterprises, the program provides inmates with various opportunities to learn agricultural and entrepreneurial skills that will assist them find jobs when released.
“It’s all designed around the idea of being a market farm operation,” Mitchell explained. “So they learn everything from soil and composting all the way up to marketing and business planning.”
At first, however, the program tilted heavily towards the farming side.
Located in Castaic just off the 5 Freeway, PDC — nicknamed the “Wayside Honor Rancho” — was a minimum-security facility when it was first built in 1938. Eugene Biscailuz, then the Sheriff of L.A. County, believed that working outdoors in the facility’s wheat fields and cattle, dairy and hog farms would help “rehabilitate the prisoners.” He thus ordered the construction of the honor farm, California’s first of its kind.
The agricultural operation closed in 1995 due to budget constraints, but reopened in 2013. A year later, Mitchell was hired to run the program with two other instructors. They decided to focus on diversified, sustainable small farm operations rather than pursuing a larger monocrop type of agriculture.
“Agricultural jobs are hard. They don’t pay great,” Mitchell explained. “So the idea that we’re asking our students to change their lives and to do that for $12.50 or $13 an hour job that put them in the heat and the sun wasn’t gonna work. If these guys were gonna succeed in agriculture, it would be by them running their own operations rather than being a worker.”
For inmates who want to get vocational training, they must first have qualified security levels. Once cleared, they are placed in one of dozens of vocational programs under the guidance of EBI, according to Sergeant Jake Gubran from the EBI Unit/Jail Enterprises Unit.
As the Sheriff’s Department matches the inmate with the program, some are not too excited when they find out they’ve been placed in an 8-week farming intensive.
“Most of them when they first come out, they’re like, ‘No, no, I don’t want to be a farmer. I don’t want to get dirty. I don’t want to work that hard. I don’t want to do some of that kind of stuff,’” Mitchell said. But they gradually realize how these new opportunities open up some life choices down the road.
Between 12 and 30 inmates are assigned to one of three farming-related sub-programs. In each, they experience a variety of curriculum and field work, ranging from soil development and greenhouse management, to large scale hay and cover crop production and to learning different types of irrigation systems.
“This is an 80% field experience, 20% classroom role,” Mitchell said.
In Mitchell’s class, students work from Monday through Friday all year round without breaks. Typically, they begin a day by releasing the sheep from their cage at 7 a.m. to let them graze on half an acre of land, then they water and check on the chickens and rabbits. At 8:45 a.m., they proceed to one of the field locations to weed, plant or irrigate. The lunch break is at 11:15 a.m., with coursework resuming in the classroom at 12:30 p.m. The last to-do’s of the day include feeding the chickens, collecting eggs and turning off irrigation at 2 p.m., which should be done within 15 minutes. Then they will change out and be escorted back to cells. Thursday is usually harvest day, when students learn good agricultural practices and food safety. After harvest, they wash, pack and distribute the food.
The produce has several destinations. The primary destination is the kitchen for meals so inmates can enjoy the food grown by themselves. Part of the produce also is available for sale to employees of the property as well as donated to communities such as Boyle Heights, said Mitchell.
Over the past six years, Mitchell has enjoyed watching his students grow in the programs, even if they initially resisted the idea of farming.
“Over time, they start to recognize that this is something they can take. And maybe they don’t start a farm, but they can grow food with their children. They start to finish planting a seed and harvesting the rewards from that. And so along with that, some of their behavioral tendencies change.”
Mitchell’s observation is well-founded. Previous studies have shown that educational and vocational training in correctional facilities help create an empowering environment conducive to self-retrospection and rehabilitation.
A 2016 study from Arcadia University, for example, notes that prisoners in the U.S. who participate in farm-based vocational training increase their likelihood of finding employment upon release while also decreasing the chance of recidivism by 20 percent. By contrast, the 2019 recidivism rate in California is 46.5 percent, according to the latest recidivism report for offenders by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
While policy limitations prevent the prison from closely interacting with farming students for a year after their release, and employment data on those formerly incarcerated is still being collected, 5-Keys employees nonetheless have been able to track the progress of some students over time.
“We know that since 2014 we’ve had seven students leave to either start careers in agriculture or to start their own farm businesses. And we know that some of those have been somewhat successful,” said Mitchell. “At least one student has acquired acreage in the Sierra Nevada foothills and created a farm there. And some others here in the urban area have created small commercial operations.”
Currently, as Mitchell put it, 5-Keys is establishing a non-custody-based farm for students interested in continuing their farming education upon release. That said, the program coordinators can better understand students’ progress.
As Mitchell drove the inmates back to their cells at the end of a day of field training and education, he passed by Field 15. There, thanks to the students’ work, two acres of peaches, nectarines, pears, pomegranates and other fruits in the orchard are burgeoning in the early spring. He reflected on how the program might impact the men sitting in his back seat.
“We are all farmers and we all interact as a team,” he said. “That changes sort of the way they view things. It makes it a much greater pleasure to come out and do the hard work.”