Nursery attempts to teach inmates job skills; open house planned for Saturday

At the end of a gravel road across from the North County Detention Center, inmate Charles Pollock is watering knee-high Chinese pistache trees, sweating in jeans and a long-sleeved work shirt in the afternoon heat.

He's making less than 25 cents an hour. And he's thrilled.

"It's better than just sitting and rotting in jail," said Pollock, 46. "At least you're outside."

The saplings and thousands of other inmate-grown plants will go on sale Saturday, when the Sonoma County Jail opens its nursery to the public for four hours.

The trees and plants - Japanese maples and flowering cherries, rose and lavender bushes and hundreds of other varieties - will sell for less than a quarter of the retail price at most other nurseries.

The jail's 11-year-old nursery program teaches work skills to inmates, many of whom have never so much as pruned a rose bush. When they complete the program, they will know how to grow trees and plants from seeds and cuttings.

"Usually toward the end of their sentence they get to come here. This is a big perk," said Rick Stern, who heads the nursery program. "They might go into landscaping when they get out. And then they'll come back and buy stuff from us."

The plants sell for just $1.50 for a 1-gallon bush to $20 for a 15-gallon tree, about half the cost of wholesale, and far below what most would retail for. Inmates are paid 10 cents to 20 cents an hour, and typically work about six hours a day.

The nursery, located at the North County Detention Facility near the airport, is open year-round by appointment only - drop-ins are discouraged so that inmates don't get impromptu visits - but twice a year it holds open houses. Stern expects 100 or more customers on Saturday.

The nursery program started in 1994 with inmates growing vegetables for the jail. But just a year later Stern expanded the program, and he now has five acres of plants and a half-dozen greenhouses.

Stern said everything is organic because inmates can't be allowed near pesticides or fertilizers - "we don't want it to end up in someone's coffee or as a bomb" - although the nursery isn't certified organic because it's an expensive process and not worth the effort, he added.

The nursery makes enough money to support itself, but Stern said he's not in it to make a profit. And despite the low prices, Sonoma County nursery owners said they don't see it as a competitive threat.

In fact, local nurseries are some of the jail's best customers.

"Rick's supplied me with pumpkins for years," said Vince Passanisi, owner of Passanisi Nursery in Penngrove. "Anything that he grows that I can use, I buy from him. The quality is halfway decent, and it's a reasonable price."

The nursery's biggest customer is the county itself. Plants and trees have been used to landscape several county buildings, and greenery has been donated to schools for fund-raising events or classroom programs.

Work programs for inmates aren't unusual, although most - including the Sonoma County Jail's nursery - run below the public radar.

The California state prison system runs a work program for about 5,600 inmates, mostly in manufacturing. They make everything from office furniture and eyeglasses to shoes and, of course, license plates. All of the prison uniforms are made by inmates, said Frank Losco, a spokesman for the Prison Industry Authority in Folsom, which runs the state's prison work programs.

"We're trying to get inmates to feel like they're working at real jobs," Losco said. "They don't get paid as much, but in prison terms they get a lot of money."