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Concurrent Education Session

TUE-C05: Bringing Nature into the Heart of Darkness: Restorative Justice in the Garden

Tuesday, October 8, 2024
3:45pm – 5:00pm ET
Location: Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Room 152AB
1.25 PDH, LA CES/HSW, AICP, NY/HSW, FL

Can the environment of a maximum-security penitentiary be transformed into a healing oasis that supports restorative justice and transformation? Incarcerated individuals at the Oregon State Penitentiary raised the funds, and two hundred inmates built the Memorial Healing Garden, demonstrating extraordinary commitment, shared purpose, dedication, and hope.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Understand alternative models to a carceral environment and how they can improve well-being and behavior, reduce recidivism, and support restorative justice goals.
  • Become familiar with the design process and challenges that designers face when working in carceral settings and the power that these acts have on the users (staff and incarcerated individuals).
  • Learn how creative strategies, thinking, and design became a form of activism to achieve the impossible, despite the pervasive conventional thinking that “it can’t be done.”
  • Learn how the skills of the landscape architect can be deployed to enrich and represent cultural meanings and transform hostile, stressful, and difficult environments to productive, therapeutic places.