Growth Industry

"In the beginning, he was a boy. Now, he's a man."

by Bruce Schimmel

T

ROY JOHNSON HAS wrestled with some of Philadelphia's biggest, baddest weeds, and he knows what it takes to get them out. "It takes a man," says the 20-year-old Kensington native, broadly smiling behind a wispy beard and black-rimmed glasses.

Eight weeks of tangling with Philly's fiercest weeds ("many taller than me") in Philadelphia's historic Bartram's Garden has taken 20 pounds off Johnson's now-lanky frame.

"But after you see what you've done," he says, as we walk past tidy paths and manicured vistas, "the result is just awesome."

Johnson is one of four in the first class of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's "Roots to Reentry" program. The pilot program trains nonviolent prisoners to be landscape workers.

By yanking weeds, Johnson hopes to bootstrap himself out of a life of crime that began at 15. At a recent graduation ceremony under Bartram's majestic trees, Johnson made a promise to a crowd that included his mother, niece, grandmother and girlfriend: "I won't let you down."

"In the beginning, he was a boy," Johnson's mom says. "Now, he's a man." During his 20-month incarceration, Johnson also earned a high school diploma — his mom brought it from home, since he'd not yet seen it. But what pleased graduates, families and officials most was the promise of what would come next. After their release, all four ex-offenders would get jobs through the program.

"Let the jobs begin!" Johnson's mom declared as the ceremony came to a close. There was much joy because jobs for ex-offenders are scarce. Prison officials say that if ex-cons can get any work at all, it's usually flipping burgers. "Roots to Reentry" will hopefully offer something better than a dead end in fast food.

But their hopes depend on whether urban horticulture can ramp up fast enough — and that's a stretch. In the last decade of PHS' Philadelphia Green, which includes the City Harvest gardening program inside prison walls [Cover Story, "The Green Payback," April 27, 2006], only about 120 jobs are created on a yearly basis. At best, that's a tiny drop in a big bucket. Every year, about 40,000 prisoners are released in Philadelphia, and an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 ex-offenders need some help.

To spur companies to hire ex-offenders, the city offers up to $5 million in tax credits yearly. Astonishingly, over the three years of the program — as the Inquirer recently reported — not a single employer has applied for the tax credit, and no hires have been made.

Still, PHS hopes that a fresh crop of gardening jobs will come through dozens of small, private landscaping companies who work for the horticultural giant.

One of the four graduates did get a permanent, full-time job at Bartram's Garden through KJK Associates, a PHS contractor. Johnson and the others, however, were offered less-permanent work at KJK. Like many city landscaping companies, KJK is a lean operation with a full-time staff of less than a dozen.

So even with his new high school diploma and a horticultural certificate, Johnson knows he's hardly out of the woods. Still, for him, pulling weeds beats shoveling fries. It makes him proud.

"I first thought gardening was going to be nerdy, women's work," says Johnson. "But this makes me feel like a man."

(bruce@schimmel.com)