And who you are, where we are, what your role is here, and then, you know, how you came to New College and what you're feeling about New College is New College law school, and what impact it had on you.
Take it away. My name is Catherine Snead, and I am the founder of The Garden Project. We are here at The Garden Project, which is located at the San Francisco County Jail.
This is the farm at the county jail. I have been here since April 15th, 1980, and before that, before I got a job here, I was at New College.
When I began in the class that started in 1976, I had just had a baby. Once I got my acceptance letter, which I didn't think I would get, so I didn't know what I would do with the brand new baby.
And I started a nursery school, a cooperative of women, parents who also were either in school or working, and together we took care of our kids.
One of the things that we did was we would, you know, everybody had a day when they had the kids. I would bring all the kids to New College.
And in fact, all of them would stay in Michael Hennessy's office, which always surprised him.
So you met Michael Hennessy. Did you meet him at New College?
I did meet Michael Hennessy at New College.
And what was Michael doing at that time? Michael later became a sheriff and we're going to eat him at New College.
So I started a nursery school and was able to go to school.
And my first impression of New College was of the law school, was I had came to California from Newark, New Jersey.
I hitchhiked here, pregnant when I was 17.
And I came here because in Newark I didn't think I could achieve my dream, which was to be a criminal lawyer.
I somehow got it in my head that I wanted to be a criminal lawyer since I was nine years old.
And one reason that I wanted to be a criminal lawyer was because I had brothers.
And even at nine years old, I believed that if my brothers ever were in jail, which I thought they would be,
if I was a lawyer I could help get them out.
And so I really wanted to be a lawyer.
And people discouraged me in high school.
They said, you know, why don't you think of being a secretary or a nurse?
And I was like, no, I want to be a lawyer.
My family, my father wanted me to be an army nurse.
No, I want to be a lawyer.
So I get this amazing letter accepting me to this law school.
And so I started the nursery school.
I show up.
And first of all, there weren't any other parents in my class.
I was 21.
The other young people were about that age.
I think there were some people maybe older than me.
And so at first I really felt like I didn't belong there.
I said, you know, I don't belong here.
There's no other parents.
They don't understand.
I'm the only poor person here.
I was on food stamps.
I was, I was actually on welfare when I first started at New College.
And so I, for the first couple of months, I was sort of like, I don't belong here.
But then meeting the students, first of all, they were very welcoming
and very different from people that I had encountered.
And the thing that really struck me about the students was that they were so,
first of all, filled with this amazing energy and the energy that was like anything is possible.
And we don't have to accept this, no, we don't have to accept that it can't happen.
And you shouldn't give up just because you have two babies that you have to take care of.
You can do it, the other students said to me.
And I was like, well, okay.
I mean, I guess that's so.
And so every day when I would show up, different ones would encourage me.
And, you know, I had never met any people like our instructors, like our professors.
I first was so impressed with Susan Jordan.
Susan Jordan, I think the thing that really struck me about her was that she was practicing law.
She was practicing law and yet every time we met her, she would just really try to impress upon us
that if we were to do something, we had to know what the law was.
But we also had to understand the historical context of the law and how it impacts people.
So it wasn't just good enough to learn all this stuff in the books.
And so she always talked about that.
She was the criminal law professor.
And but also she was a young woman.
And I was like, I want to be like her.
And to be able to say, I want to be like her meant so much to me.
And I'd go home and I'd be so excited.
And my family was like, what's going on at that place?
What's going on?
And then, again, just with Susan, as she talked about her work, her practice, her clients,
what some of her hurdles have been, some of the obstacles, she was so giving of herself.
And the other folks were, I mean, the other students,
I don't know that she made the kind of impression on them that she did to me.
Because I felt very connected to her.
Because I had, as an undergraduate, worked in the public defender's office
and in the juvenile public defender's office.
And she really encouraged me to continue either working in the public defender's office or somewhere.
And so I said, you know, I really want to work with the public defender's office.
She said, well, go down there and do it.
And she gave me some names of some judges and some folks.
And I went down and I said, well, Susan Jordan said, I should come and here I am.
And they were like, well, Susan Jordan said it, well, you OK?
Why don't you do this?
And by the end of my first year, I was doing arraignment in arraignment court by myself.
And the second year, I was doing more arraignments.
And by my third year, I was doing felony arraignments.
And really, again, because I had gotten this amazing confidence from hearing and knowing Susan.
But it was also true of the other professors.
Tom, Mac, you know, again, this confidence that all three of our professors had,
the confidence in the law and the power of the law to help people and to help lives and help the world
and understanding the law and really appreciating what it should and could do
and pushing us to find that and do that and not to just, again, get lost in the books
or get lost in the prestige or get lost in how cool you are when you go to court and do this or do that.
And the power, I guess, that some lawyers may get hooked on.
They really seem to be more about helping us to understand that we did have the power to do something different
and that things that had been done before us in the law and other areas
weren't the things that should and could stay the same, that they should be changed, and that we could do that.
And again, the three of them, Tom, Tom, Mac, Peter, Peter, I mean, I never thought that I'd understand anything about contracts.
And yet Peter was so confident that we could learn. He was so confident that it had a place in our lives and in the world.
But most important, a place to move things forward, that it wasn't just this thing in a box,
but rather it was something that could really change people and help make change in a real way.
And like every time, every time we met with them, it was this amazing confidence and energy and also pushing us to try, to keep trying
and believing in us that we could be someone and someone that made a difference.
And as I got older, and as I've gotten older, you know, I still think about all three of them.
And the other thing that really impressed me and I realize now is that they loved what they were doing, and that's why they were so good.
They loved their understanding of the law. They loved conveying that information to young people and not so young people.
And it really made it something that I've never experienced again.
And but on the other hand, as now a kind of a teacher myself, I've tried to sort of emulate their model.
And what I've learned is if you care about what you're teaching, then it shows and it does affect the people that hear it and understand it
and helps to frame where people go.
But also, again, thinking about the three of them and thinking that they probably didn't know the power that they had as teachers
to take our minds and change and help them to grow into something better and bigger.
But what they had was just what they had, and that was the knowledge that they had gotten through their experience and through their learning
and then the desire to share it in a meaningful way.
So tell us, I don't know the story. How do you meet my tendency? What was he doing there himself?
And then how did this eventually lead to your work here?
Well, in my fourth year at New College, Ray Tobis, who I'm not sure what he is other than them being friends at that time.
He was a rabble.
Yes. But anyway, Ray Tobis came to our class to speak at the Michael's Prison Law class.
And what was Ray's job?
He worked in the Sheriff's Department.
He had worked in the Sheriff's Department but wasn't currently at the Sheriff's Department.
Michael Hennessey, I guess, was at New College.
He had started the legal services program here at the jail.
And I believe Ray and Michael had worked together before that.
And so Ray, I think, would come and be a guest speaker at Michael's class.
So Ray came and was a guest speaker at his class.
And our first failed trip was to Santa Rita Jail, which was horrible.
And so I went. And afterwards, it was so horrible.
And Michael was like, well, you know, this is what jails are and women are horrible and they're treated badly
and we have to make some changes and we've got to do this and we're going to do this.
And then the next thing I knew Michael was running for sheriff.
But I said to myself, again, this is so like New College because, okay, things are messed up.
Are you going to accept it? No. We're going to do something about it.
And I believe that the courage that Michael must have had having worked in RJ all here in San Francisco
and then to say it's wrong what's happening here, it doesn't work, it has to change, and I will do it.
And again, that was to me what New College was about.
It wasn't, well, it's bad and we're going to leave it alone.
It's bad. We're going to change it.
We're going to do the work to make it different.
And when Michael said, I'm going to run for sheriff, I was like, well, okay, that's the worst horrible job ever.
And then he won.
But again, that didn't surprise me because he was not going to let stand the garbage that was happening in the jail.
And I remember him saying more than once that the people had done something wrong,
but that was not an excuse for them being mistreated.
And that was against the law and we had to do something about it.
And so he ran for sheriff, he won.
And when he won, he offered me a job here at the jail doing legal services because I had been doing legal services with them.
And so for me, it meant that I now had a paycheck.
My kids could go to school with lunch every day and I could buy clothes for them.
And I could get to work and take care of my family.
And so I, of course, took the job and I was here two years and I developed a kidney disease.
And they said, you're not going to survive this.
I spent a year back and forth in the hospital.
This was in 1982.
And finally they said, well, there's nothing more we can do.
You should go home or if you want to stay here and die, you may.
Michael Hennessey and Ray came to visit me at the hospital because people were coming to say goodbye.
And Ray brought the grapes of rat to me because Ray was an education major.
He was always giving books and always talking about books.
And I had been a runaway so I didn't read a lot of different great books, I guess.
And so he brought the grapes of rat and he said, you know, feeling sorry for yourself, read this great book.
And I was like, I am feeling sorry for myself.
I'm dying or they're saying I'm dying.
And he's like, read the book.
I read the book and I believed and believed that the message of the book was that when you can connect people to land, there's hope.
And so when Michael came back because I was going to get ready to get sent home,
I was like, Michael, you know, I would really, I want to come back to work and I want to bring the prisoners outside
because if we could, if they could connect to land, they would, you know, we could really make some changes.
And Michael was like, you know, when you get out of the hospital, absolutely, we can do that.
I was like, I'm getting out of the hospital tomorrow. I'm coming to work tomorrow.
Did you heal from the kidneys?
I went into remission after two years.
And so for two years, the prisoners carried me from the jail out here.
And there was nothing here because the jail had stopped using the farm and they hadn't used it since the late 60s.
And so, you know, it was overgrown and all the storage, it had basically become a storage place.
And so the prisoners and I cleaned it up basically for two years.
But the thing that I really realized quickly is the prisoners were completely different out here than they were inside.
Inside they were fighting and arguing and doing God knows what all the time. It was horrible.
But here they, first of all, were really concerned about me, which I hadn't experienced them being concerned about other things or anybody.
And the deputies said they're going to kill her out there and that's good because she's a communist, so that might be helpful.
And so every day when the prisoners brought me back, the deputies were like, you won't be back, you'll be dead.
And I went into remission. And the prisoners would come out and they would say, you know, what's that sound?
They're frogs and birds. And it really was evident that they had not had a connection with the natural world.
And that was what was missing in their life. And they were just joyous out here.
I mean, they didn't have one coat. They had thin clothes and flip-flops and, you know, it was raining.
It was cold every day when I came. They'd be ready to go. And they'd carry me out here and deposit me and do all this stuff.
And then I went into remission. And I believe I went into remission because I suddenly had hope that I could make some changes in these people's lives.
I could make changes in my own life. And so I didn't die.
And Michael continued to let the prisoners come out. And by our tenth year, the whole jail was coming out.
And everybody wanted to come out. But then they didn't want to leave because for a lot of people, this was the best life they had had, you know.
And so I would ask Michael, could they stay after their sentence was over? And Michael would be like, so jail, they can't stay after their sentence was over.
We got us in the moan. And so I started a program outside of San Francisco, The Garden Project, to employ prisoners.
And again, you know, I went to Michael and I was like, Michael, they, you know, what are we going to do?
They, you know, they want to stay in the jail. And they keep coming back. And the ones that don't come back, they die.
And it's just horrible. And, you know, I'm glad we're doing the garden, but it's not enough.
And what's missing is a way for people to learn how to work. That's what's missing.
They don't know how to work. They don't. My father and mother went to work every day.
So I have that experience that a lot of these folks don't. And so who's going to hire them?
And, you know, over the years, I knew all these lawyers and I'd get people jobs in their offices and, you know, name a lawyer.
And they would hire people. You know, I had met them in new college. And so they would hire the people.
And, you know, they would last a day or maybe too much time, they'd be gone or they'd take the people's verses and do God knows what.
And so Michael was like, well, you have a job here. Why don't we just do the job here?
And I was like, well, but if we have an employment program, it would be better.
He's like, okay, yeah, okay. So he encouraged me to start the garden project of employing former prisoners.
And we did that for 10 years and we are now employing young people before they really get lost in the criminal justice system.
This past summer we had 300 teenagers. The summer before we had 300 teachers too.
Our current police chief sends them. He has been sending them since he was a captain at Bayview.
And for these kids, you know, many of these kids are the kids, the grandkids of the people that I started here with.
And, but now they're gaining skills in those young people that you met are, they came to me when they were freshmen in high school.
They're now juniors in college. Each summer they've worked with us. They're the staff for our 300 teenager.
And what we do here is we grow thousands of tons of vegetables and we feed or take to deliver them to the soup kitchens,
to Project Open Hand, to food pantries in the schools.
And basically what I'm trying to do is teach people how to work and this garden and this farm is the way to do that.
And, but also again from these three magical teachers that I had, I'm trying to share with them what I love and that is my love of plants.
After I went in.
How are you coming from Newark? How do you have a love of plants?
Well, after I went into remission and before, before I came back to work, I took a two year leave
and I went to Emerson College in England, which is a biodynamic school training, a Waldorf school training school,
with a biodynamic agriculture course. So I did that.
And then I went to UC Santa Cruz. They're a farm and garden program and came back and started growing, growing lots and lots and lots of food.
We've planted 10,000 street trees in San Francisco.
We've had contracts with the city now, I think at least 16 to 18 million dollars in the last 20 years.
We've employed thousands of people and I really do credit New College because again, there was a sense that
if you believe in yourself and you believe in other people, then you can do something.
And but also if you work with other people together, it'll get done.
And that's what I saw and that's what I believe New College was about.
And New College was also the locus, the place where you and Michael Hennessy and Michael Marko and Sonny Schwartz
and there was a synergy that brought you all together in one spot.
I mean, it probably wouldn't have generated all this otherwise.
Well, again, I think, and what I've learned again from those magical people,
that when you love what you do and believe in it, it really impacts people.
And those guys really did.
What about them being the project of restorative justice? Can you talk about that?
Well, what I can talk about is that I guess the restorative justice part that I know and experience is
taking folks who have no belief that they have a future and helping them to create a future for themselves
by learning how to work, learning how to take care of themselves, learning to give to others.
I think that is restorative in and of itself.
And also helping people to understand that we're all connected and we're down.
It doesn't just affect that senior, it affects all of us and the person who did it, first of all.
And helping people to see that when I first started giving the vegetables away,
one of the places that we gave them to was Project Open Hand.
And we did that because many of the prisoners would talk about their past where they would pray on people.
And many of them would say, well, we prayed on gay people because they were vulnerable.
And it seemed to me that if they began to see the people that they were praying on as people, that they then wouldn't be able to pray on them.
And many of them said, you know, after we started taking those vegetables to Project Open Hand, I couldn't do that anymore.
I couldn't knock out people and take their money or hurt them.
And I think, again, understanding our criminal justice system and how it has its limitations,
I learned that actually what I wanted to be was not a lawyer, but someone who could help people to stay out of jail.
And when I realized that lawyers help people to get out, don't help them to stay out,
I realized that this was the path that I wanted to be on all along.
And so that's where I am.
I mean, this is who would be possible for lawyers, judges, and gardeners like you to do this in jail all across the country.
And why not, you know, have the garden for every prison?
What's the response of this? How do you, is there, how open would you say the prison industrial complex, as it's sometimes called,
is to a healing-centered approach to what happens to people who are incarcerated?
Well, I think that because our country has not been good at understanding, to me, the core issue with why people end up in jail,
which is, for the most part, because I believe people of color have not had an opportunity to work.
And so if you don't work, I mean, that's the other thing that I saw again at New College with the professors in our first year.
They loved their work and that their love of their work gave them the confidence to do really well.
If you don't have work, if you don't have, where do you get that from?
And what I've seen is thousands of people who have no sense of worth because they've never had an opportunity to work.
And so if you don't have that, then what do you have?
And I think that we get lost in what maybe what someone has done or what their past has been.
You met Vincent. Vincent did 23 years for second-degree murder.
And his cousin was one of our tree planters.
And every year she would ask me to write a letter to the parole board.
And every year I would say, there is no way they're letting your cousin out.
It's not going to happen. Tell your family he won't get out.
And then one day they call me from the front gate, there's a guy at the gate, should I send him up?
And I was like, oh, and I go down there and there's Vincent who I had never met.
And he said, they let me out. And he's crying. They let me out.
And you wrote me the letter. You didn't even know me.
And I said, but your cousin planted 10,000 trees with us.
And he said, my family believed that this was how I could get out.
And while he was in prison, he became a pastry chef.
And so what he's been doing with us, I mean, among other things, is we make pies, make cakes,
and give them to seniors, give them to schools, give them to families.
And talk about healing. And that's a healing.
I mean, he made a bunch of pies for, and we gave them to the deputies that rushed out back and forth.
And they were just like, you did this?
And I saw that actually with the vegetables, when we started producing the vegetables,
the deputies would call the people, the prisoners, the worst names.
And it wasn't until we started bringing the vegetables in there, they were like,
we can't believe those dirt bags did this.
They could grow broccoli. Like, they're not dirt bags. They didn't.
And they were like, what's going on out there?
And then when they would come out, they were like, what are you doing with these people?
And you know, because they would all be working and doing all this stuff.
And again, that confidence and that sharing that I think is change in action.
Do you have more questions?
Well, what I want to say is actually, I believe there is a spirit that remains.
And the spirit is that it's not just in a book. You do.
And for me, teaching people who, I mean, I've had people who read at kindergarten level.
And so I can't give them a book and say, learn about horticulture.
But I can show them. I can help them to do it.
And that's what I learned at New College.
When Susan said, you want to do arraignments, go do them.
You want to be a criminal lawyer, be that.
When Tom talked about torts and, you know, and how, you know, I mean, different cases have made huge changes in the law.
When Peter was talking about contract law, I mean, it was all, the idea was, this is what it is.
But with our understanding and with our, with our energy, we could make it better.
And I believe that that spirit is still with me.
And, you know, I haven't seen Tom or Susan, you know, many, many years.
Peter, I see my neighbor, but I believe it goes on.
And I believe that it is something that should be shared with other folks.
And I do think that it was a good model.
And I was very sad to see it stop.
As far as race relations, is there any comment you want to make about that while you were at New College?
Did you agree on the story?
Was there any change in terms of recently the general society at large?
As far as race is concerned, or gender, or people of color, having been represented in this school?
Well, at New College, I mean, I, again, I, a single welfare mother being there, I mean, was very different.
Being, you know, taking a class with someone from Harvard was very different.
And, but someone from Harvard never said single welfare mother, you shouldn't be here.
And in fact, encouraged me to try harder so I could go, could continue, because it was very hard for me.
And the, you know, the other students studied with me to help me.
And so I never had a sense that I, I mean, that my initial thought that I couldn't do it, and I wouldn't make it,
and I didn't belong there, went away very quickly.
I mean, you know, some of the students, you know, like Randy Dar and Julie Tron, and those two for sure.
I mean, I can't remember all of them, but each one of them, as they went on to the world and did stuff,
you know, and I would see them or know that they were doing stuff, it would make me very proud, you know,
because they were very smart, and, but they were smart because they worked at it, because they believed in it,
not because, you know, they were just born that way, and some of them were probably born that way.
But very smart in, in trying to get more skills so that they would be better at what they were doing.
And that has stayed with me. I've tried to get better by learning as much as possible about what I'm doing.
Thank you.
